


Better Days {and the bottom drops out}

by CypressSunn



Series: One Hundred and One Prompts [15]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Fortune Telling, Racism, bar fighting, lying by omission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-02-10 14:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/pseuds/CypressSunn
Summary: “An object at rest will remain at rest until some other force acts upon it.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grapecase](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapecase/gifts).



> For Nathalie, who put up with me for far, far too long.

_"Now, my cup's filled up with five-buck wine_  
_ I find myself here all the time_  
_ Another rip in the glass_  
_ Another chip in my tooth_  
  
_ Rained on, I've been stained on_  
_ Found another goat I try to put the blame on_  
_ And now I'm stepping on all the cracks_  
_ So I guess there ain't no use"_  
_— Citizen King._

 

 

 

Some drunk asshole at the Wild Pony blindsides Alex Manes, kicking his prosthetic out from under him during a pool match sending him careening to the sticky bar floor. Michael is up and over his table before the bouncers even react. Near breaks his good hand and splintering a pool stick is no easy feat. But it takes two people— Max included— to pull him off the bastard. And Michael’s more than a little proud of his own restraint.

Afterward, when Alex has huffed off, red-faced and humiliated, more angry at Michael than he is at that small-town reject Jonesy Frederick playing footsie with his war wounds, Maria will bring him a silver bucket of ice chips for his bruised knuckles and pour him a hero’s drink. Top shelf, amber dark on the rocks.

It’s how Michael passes the rest of the evening. Perched at the throne of the high bar knocking back shot after shot. Watching Jonesy's crew swear and scuffle their way out. Watching the police mill in, mill out, keeping form and doing nothing. Watches Acey Jenner cheat flagrantly at poker and Hank Long break the vending machine— again. Eats through a bowl of pretzels as he savors the passive-aggressive bickering and channel switching on the mounted TV between The Game and The Match. And him, comfortable and numb between the ice and the alcohol Maria’s still pouring when she rings back around after decking the handsy out-of-towners harassing her waitresses.

“Still lookin’ pleased with yourself,” Maria remarks, shoving the next drink before him. It’s a double this time, chilled in a highball glass.

Michael beams, chin lifted. “Why wouldn’t I be? Another notch in my belt. Free booze. And my favorite humble pastime; human watching.”

“Just gonna kick up your feet and watch the horror show?”

“It’s more like…,” Michael  rubs at his chin, “playing with an ant farm.”

“You would like lording over the small trapped minds as they skitter about.”

“Now you're getting it, DeLuca.”

She laughs him off, “You know, they are not completely hopeless.”

“You cannot possibly believe that,” Michael drains his glass, incredulous.

“I believe many things, Guerin. Most would surprise you.” Maria hits the master switch located under the bar register. The lights flicker off for but a moment and Maria doesn’t take her eyes off of Michael as she commands the bar’s attention: “Roswell! It’s been a mighty fine evening but that’s last call. And you know what that means. ‘You ain’t gotta go home—’”

“‘—but you cain’t stay here!” swells dozens of drunk, cheery voices.

Michael chuckles into his bad hand, finding himself mouthing on to the call and response without evening meaning to.

“See? Not so hopeless after all. And who says you can’t train a town full of drunks.”

“Only a fool,” Michael doesn’t rise from his stool, accepts his refilled bowl of pretzels and swipes a red maraschino off a plate headed for the back kitchen. The debilitated denizens of Roswell are falling into their cabs and ride-shares and designated driver’s pickup trucks. The stragglers settle up their tabs and pinch and wade out with waitstaff and hired hulks who punch out after every chair is stacked and floor mopped of the night’s shame and business.

And still, Maria isn’t kicking him out. Michael decides he should wear chivalry on his fists more often. It’s a welcome change of pace.

“Let’s see what we have here,” Maria removes the dented bucket, shakes his wrist of droplets. The ice is long gone; all that’s left is a melt of runny pink from blood and the acetone he’d poured in from a flask. Maria doesn’t ask as she lifts his hand by the wrist, inspecting too closely. The split knuckles, the palm lines, each calloused tip and nail beds with motor oil that won’t wash away. No swelling and a far cry from the deformity left on his other hand.

“Tell me a lie,” Maria says, tracing the M on his palm.

He mulls it over. “I wear tighty-whities. Why?”

“Calibrating,” is her answer, matter-of-fact. “Another one.”

“I love hipster homebrews. Best thing to ever happen to alcohol.”

She turns his hand again and again. Taps each knuckle twice. “Good things come in threes,” she prompted one last time.

“The earth is flat and I can prove it.”

That earns a smirk. “Okay. Now tell me something true.”

Michael could say a lot of things to that. That he’d been building a spaceship since the age of nineteen, that he didn’t believe in parlor tricks, that he once dared Max to jump off the guardrail at County Road B and when Isobel found out she mind-whammied the kids at the group home to cover his homework in gravy to feed to the dogs, that he planned to blow out every single tire on Jonesy Frederick’s shitty Dodge Ram pickup, or that her hands had no business being this delicate after a hard night of slinging drinks and taking swings, smelling of—

Cocoa. Cedar oil.

“A body at rest will remain at rest until some other force acts upon it.”

She bites her lip, satisfied, but curls a beckoning finger. _Keep ‘em coming_.

Michael raises an eyebrow but does as he’s told. “The external force upon an object is equal to the change in momentum per change in time.” 

She tilts her head, stray hairs slipping lose. She blew one delicate breath over his hand. And if Michael shifted in his seat, she didn’t notice. Her whole gimmick, the DeLuca family gift, it was more palatable under the veneer of a thrumming bar, with the jukebox on and the clink of coin and misbehavior in the air. Now, it felt less theatrical.

Now, it felt like she really believed.

Maria finally looks up at him, not his hands. In the low glow of the remaining bar light, no smile this time, she begins, “and for every action there is—?”

“—an equal and opposite reaction.”

Maria nods. Solemn and out of place. Turns and pulls a dusty bottle off the highest shelf and contemplates it in her hands. He remembers her telling him once it was a rye whiskey, distilled recipe from American slaves.

Only for the best of occasions. Or the worst of them.

“Done trying to see my future, DeLuca?”

Michael wipes up his hands with the thin papery napkins out of the dispenser. Nonchalant. He doesn’t buy into this new age garbage. He doesn’t.

“Guerin. Tell me, and tell me now,” she uncorked the bottle and takes a deep swig. “What did you do to Alex Manes tonight?”

“Besides defending his honor and sullied uniform?” Michael huffs out.

“Jonesy hit him hard. And I mean, real hard,” she repeats, drinking again. Michael doesn’t disagree. He’d seen everything, how Alex pitched back, freefalling. Maria had been even closer to the shitshow than he had. “He was going to bite it, big time. I tried to catch him but—”

“He won’t hold it against you,” Michael cuts in.

“No, because something else did. Hold him, I mean— The second before he hit the ground, he just… hovered. Like something was holding him up.”

 _Shit_.

“Hovered? Like science fiction?” Michael leans in, faux intrigued. “Are you telling me the U.S. Air Force taught him to fly more than just planes?”

“You were watching— you reacted first, before anyone else. Before you punched Jonesy—” She shakes her head, biting the fullness of her bottom lip. “I felt it happen. Even if Alex couldn’t.”

“Trust me, DeLuca, I'd take credit for miracles. But in accordance with the laws of physics— several of which I just laid out for you— I didn’t catch Alex because I couldn’t catch Alex. No one could.”

Maria’s eyes jotted down, and when Michael followed her stare, he found she was holding his hand again. Reading him.

For a split second, the same second it had taken his mind to reach out and break Alex’s fall, he believed in ESP and third eyes and not-so hopeless humans that were more than he’d bargained for. Believed Maria DeLuca when she warned him, “you can't con me, Guerin. I've got your number.”

“Climb up onto this counter and jump,” he goads, hand slipping into his pocket. “See if I catch you.”

She damn well just might if the set in her shoulders as she wraps her lips around the bottle one more time is anything to go by. So Michael knocks back his own drink and staggers to the door and the dry heat of the Roswell night before either of them need call each other’s bluff.

* * *

DeLuca can't prove a thing. Not a goddamn thing. Michael paces his trailer committing this to a fact, to memory, to the worn dust-ridden carpet below. The Wild Pony was so far behind the technological curve they're still waiting on word from Santa Anna. So no cameras. No closed circuit. No proof. Only Maria DeLuca’s sharpened no-bullshit radar. And she’s good.

But no one’s that good.

By his second bottle of acetone, he figures the smart thing to do is deny,   wait, and deny some more. Keep up appearances. Avoid Alex the same way Alex is avoiding him. Warn Max and Isobel to be extra boring it the coming days.  

Except no. Michael has prided himself for too long on being the one they came to with their problems. Always justified his place between them with elbow grease and a socket wrench. He’s the one who fixes things. Keeps Max focused and Isobel calm, the motors running and the acetone stocked in bulk.

Michael doesn't need to concern them. He can handle Maria DeLuca.

* * *

Keeping up appearances means arriving just after sunset and ready for a bender. The parking lot is already over packed and a line is held up by the door where Jonesy Frederick himself is out in full form, taking the news of his lifetime ban especially hard from the doorman.

“You’re letting Guerin back in?” the agitator complains as Michael cuts ahead, tipping his hat to the line of disgruntled faces. “He threw the first punch!”

Michael claps a hand on Jonesy's shoulder with all the cavalier of old friends, leaning in close where Big Jim— Michael’s second least favorite bouncer has Jonesy by the shirt collar. “And I’d gladly throw another,” he menances with a low relish. But before he can make good on his promise she appears.

The patron saint of booze herself, deadcenter of doorway, all bronze and golden where the neon glow meets the twilight. Anyone with the good sense to know-so steps back when she walks forward. Michael sidles closer, watching as she sticks her ringed notepad in her back pocket and stashes her pencil in the twisted knot of hair atop her head. Her rouge lined simper lavishing the degenerate with one word of warning; “Out, or I’ll show you out.”

“It’s a free country and I’m a paying—”

It’s over in a second. The bouncer still has the loudmouths arms in lock and Maria kicks his knee out from under him, just as he had done to Alex. Delivers a blow to the jaw next and the man goes startlingly limp, still conscious, but a hell of a lot quieter.

Michael whistles in low down appreciation. It’s a beautiful sight really. “Why do you even bother to hire bouncers?” He asks, following Maria inside.

“Can’t be in three places at once.” She’s smiling, but not like she had at Jonesy. It’s a good sign. The familiar worn-in tug between them, a two-piece accompaniment belting sad country covers, and his seat beckoning across the throng of bodies; all in a usual weekend night at the Wild Pony. Nothing to fear, until they reach the bar and Maria points two fingers up behind the shelf wall, next to the state-by-state expired license plates mounted to the wall. His mugshot is tacked up next to Jonesy Frederick’s on the Do Not Serve list.

“Oh, c’mon! DeLuca—”

She whips out a rag and polishes the counter. The resin lacquer is already gleaming bright. “It’s not a full ban, Guerin,” she promises, “in recognition of your service to those who actually serve, we won’t be removing you from the premises.”

“But you’ll deny me alcohol?” Michael scoffs, indignant, grabbing for the dish towel she’s using to ignore him. She holds tight, pulls when he pulls in their ridiculous game of tug-o-war

“Guess that depends,” Maria voices in a tone he’s never heard her use before, eyes set and narrow on him, and they’re the only two people in the Wild Pony, in all of Roswell, New Mexico, “on whether or not you’re still denying what happened the other night?”

“Yeah, DeLuca,” Michael lets go of the rag. “I’m denying the figment of your imagination.”

“Well then, you can still sit there all night and look pretty. And you can do it dry as the desert.”

“You think I’m pretty?” Michael sidetracks, batting his eyelashes.

It doesn’t work. “I think you're something, alright." Her tone is too stern. Searching. The meaning hangs free, open for any explanation Michael cares to give. When he doesn’t she gathers up the tips next to the ashtrays under the no smoking sign and gets back to business.

She really does ignore him for the rest of the night, as do the rest of the apron wearing waitress. Even the short order cooks ignore him. Maria has them well trained. By the second hour sobriety is becoming nigh intolerable, and Michael slaps down every bill he has to the counter demanding service to which  Maria brings him a glass of water. Michael eyes the beverage with far more vexation than is due.

When Maria isn't looking, too busy helping the hostess rearrange seating larger parties coming in for the half off appetizers, Michael grabs the nearest bottle from behind the counter. Pours a stiff one in the nearest glass he can fine and swings it back. No burn. No aftertaste.

Just sweet tea.

In the corner of his eye he can see Maria shaking her head, as if she wouldn’t have already thought of that. Michael dumped the rest of his glass into the lined metal drain along the counter.

Really, the woman was just diabolical.

“Let it go, DeLuca,” Michael warns when she’s come back around. It’s a last ditch attempt. He’s already given up, got his hat back on and his eyes on the exit sign.

“Enjoy the tourist bars, Guerin!” she calls after him.

* * *

A two block walk over, he learns the Saturn's Ring doesn’t serve straight alcohol. So he orders the nearest thing, something called a Sonic Screwdriver. It’s a frilly, overpriced, blue dye no. 5 citrus confection and an affront to good taste and burgeoning alcoholism. Not to say he doesn’t drink it.

But he does hate himself after.

It’s then, fiddling the the spaceship shaped coasters, he realizes he’s never had to make nice with DeLuca before. Not really. Her ledger is as long as her good books were short— but they had always shared a tacit respect. The trade of given-as-good-as-gotten barbs, no take-backs, no welshing. An unspoken barter system between them had removed such a need. If he broke something, he fixed. If he started a fight, he finished it. If he ran up too long a tab, he tuned-up her truck.

No apologies. No explanations.

A waitress in an alien mask that had to be some form of copyright infringement comes around again, recommending the Stormtrooper Shooter and Michael couldn’t take much more of this. He needed what any good alien needed:

He needed a cover story.

*

Michael is more than certain he can wing it. Feel for it in the moment, giving vague and ambiguous answers. The less definitive, the less it’s feels like a lie for her to pick up on. That’s all her psychic bit could be, in the end. The tight strung intuition of a woman who spent her life needing to gauge and engage every small-towner that darkened her doorstep. A barometer for the provincial and smilingly hostile. A survival tool turned party trick.

But it plays and replays in his mind. The moment the cheap shot collided with Alex. How he buckled like he was nothing, Maria lunging for him but not close enough. Michael dove on instinct, his powers moving before he could stop himself. And he almost, almost remembered Maria turning her head. Even as she reached for Alex, eyes moving away, watching something that could not be seen. Watching him—

_‘I felt it. Even if Alex couldn’t.’_

Michael stops in his tracks. Spread out before him is the Wild Pony parking, empty and dead silent. His truck is still there, standing stark and lonely against the night. There’s no line at the door. All the lights are off. At eleven thirty on a Saturday night.

Something is wrong.

* * *

“DeLuca!” He calls several times to no answer. The place is worse than a ghost town inside; it’s trashed. Several chairs are smashed and splintered, legs rolled in every direction across the floor. Overturned as well as the upended   trash cans. There’s glass everywhere and footprints leading from the spilt puddles of liquor like there’d been a riot, an evacuation. But no alarms pulled or sirens in the distance. Whatever went down here was as quick as it was dirty.

“DeLuca!” he yells again and nothing moves, no one appears, but he does find that someone took a goddamned knife to the bartop. It juts out at a disquieting angle from the wood, right in front of his usual seat. The dish rag left hanging there looks red with something wet—

“Maria,” Michael says, not bothering to holler this time. “If you’re not out here in five seconds…”

She appears in three. Waltzing out from the back office with a bottle in hand. The downhome whiskey from the night before. “In case you haven’t noticed, we closed early.”

It’s tongue and cheek and devoid of any explanation for the uproarious state of the bar, her livelihood. It’s also an insult to both his intelligence and his irascible nature, but he tamps it down the psychokinetic scream building inside.

“Try again.”

“Look,” she sits at the counter in one of the only two chairs not thrown aside, “I’ve already been through this with two third of the sheriff’s department, including your favorite parole officer—”

“I’m not him,” Michael scoffs.

“No, Guerin, you’re the guy on my wall who needs to…” and the rest grays out of Michael’s awareness, her voice trailing into background radiation. Michael is close enough to her just then to see it. The dark raised flush to her skin below her eye. Raw and red. It looks like it stings. Michael still isn’t listening to the yarn she’s spinning when he steps behind the counter. There he’s scooping ice into the cleanest cloth napkin he can find. Her protestations barely register when he presses it to her face. As distant to him as the clastic boulder at the edge of the parking, the edge of his mind ripping it in half, down the middle, like clay, like wet paper.

“Michael.”

That cuts through. She’s never called him that before. It takes a lot to reins in his control. More than it has in years, reminding him of how he made floorboard in his group homes quake or the gym windows shatter the time he found Max cornered by a pack of sentient jockstraps. Michael blinks, and breathes and tells himself the boulder is nothing Maria will notice until he’s long gone, until after he's found whoever the hell laid hands on her.

“—I said don’t get all noble on me, Guerin. I gave as good as I got.”

“What happened here?”

Maria rolls her eyes. They look red, too. Not that she would let herself cry. “Jonesy's cousins are in town. Rolled in right after you left. They had a few complaints about my… business acumen.”

Michael can see it. The lot of them blowing through the doors, knocking over everything, slurs ringing out, the rowdier and indifferent drunks joining them as everyone else rushed out.

“Where the hell were your bouncers?”

“Jonsey has a lot of cousins.”

“And that?” Michael points to her face. She covers it up with the ice pack as best as she can, as if Michael could un-see it.

“Here,” Maria deflects, hands him a fifth of whiskey. “Bottle service.”

Michael can only stare at it and then back at her, disbelieving.

“Take it and go, Guerin,” she tells him, defeated. “I have to fix all of this. And right now, you are the least of my problems.”

Out of everything, everything, Michael finds that the most infuriating. He is her least favorite customer. It’s a title he will not relinquish.

She disappears into the kitchen behind the swinging ranch doors and he sits there, fuming. Doesn’t touch the bottle she’s left next to the makeshift ice pack. Doesn’t do much besides grind his teeth over how he’d come back here tonight to lie to her. Concoct a cover-up, keep his secret safe. Wear her down until she believed him, over her own eyes, over her own senses. It felt so small and petty now that Michael had to laugh. Laugh until it boiled over and he slapped his deformed hand down against the counter.

“Last call,” he announces to no one at all, and the chaos across the bar comes to life. 

Every upturned piece of furniture rights itself, skidding over to their proper placing. Garbage bags fly open off rolling mop cart, filling with debris and glass and twisted closed when full. The mops levitate out of the back closet and swipe across the floor, wringing and unwringing themselves out over a bucket tucked in the corner. Even the pool sticks line up on the rack.

Everything’s where it should be when the doors swing open and Maria steps in. Still and neat and lifeless.

Eyes wide, Maria takes a step back. Crossing her arms with a silent look.

“You just sit there and look pretty, DeLuca,” he tells her, heading for the door. “Pour me something neat while I go get my tool box.”

* * *

Michael fixes the OPEN sign before he starts on the light fixtures, levels out a few wobbling tables, and removes a busted window pane to cover up with a tarp Maria drags from somewhere. He gets the back door on its hinges again, unjams the dishwasher rack that got kicked in, and pries that damn knife out of woodwork. He remounts the TV after an hour’s worth of rewiring, gets the steer head back in the rafter and when he gets down from the ladder Maria looks remiss, shuffling on her feet with cash in her hands and Michael pretends he doesn’t see.

“They didn’t even break that,” Maria points out when Michael pries open the hatch to the ATM that hasn’t worked since the Reagan administration.

“They didn’t break the jukebox either, DeLuca.”

Maria rolls her eyes, edging back to the dance floor. The clink of coinage winds up before the rattle and roll of blues rock fills the air. He loves this one. He’s never told her as much, but it’s DeLuca. She just knows.

It’s well after midnight by the time the night’s damage has been undone. Not that Michael is anywhere near finished. He’s measured out a few squeaking floorboards that need replacing before he carries out the unsalvageable to the dumpster. All the while Maria has her feet up, as per Michael’s orders, waiting and watching him closely. Or as closely as someone can while steadily polishing off a bottle of the good stuff.

“You know,” Michael starts slowly, surveying the remnants of it all, “Jonesy and his idiot crew wouldn’t have had the upper hand if I’d been here.”

It’s a accusation. One that clearly rankles her. If Michael were smarter, he wouldn’t push, wouldn’t remind her of their falling out.

“And why weren’t you here, Guerin?” Maria demands, leaning forward. It's also an accusation; as if his choice and her ultimatum carried the same weight, the same responsibility.

He doesn’t answer because it’s another chance to tell her everything. And he just can’t.

“I’ll be there next time,” he promises, feeling the moment slip out of his grasp.

Maria shakes her head. Takes another sip.

“You’re still not gonna let me drive you home, are you?”

Maria scoffs, “and come back to my bar trashed all over again? They’ll bust in as soon as I leave— break the windows, spray paint ‘nig—’” Maria hiccuped, “—all over the walls and”

“So you’re gonna fight ‘em off in this state?”

Maria nodded, until she got vertigo and needing steadying against the counter. In all the years he’d been coming there, he’d never seen her this drunk. “You gotta sleep it off DeLuca. I’ll keep watch.”

Maria sags against him as he helps her up. “There’s a cot in the office.”

He carries her bridal style to the back room, something he can’t wait to hold it against her forever. Reckons the back office is the only part of the Wild Pony he hasn’t become intimately acquainted with in one way or another. It’s a small cramped room with an embarrassingly bohemian spread; a hanging bead doorway and crocheted wall hangings, dried out desert flowers over the staff books and a row of potted succulents next to a god’s honest lava lamp.

Maria curls up on the twin bed under the window Michael sets her on, lets him tuck a blanket over her and brush the hair out of her eyes. They’re a different color in the low light. Like desert agate caught in the moonlight.

“Hand.” Maria whispers, holding out her own. Michael doesn't protest. Sits on the edge of the bed, slips his good hand into hers.

“Lie to me, Michael.”

He likes how his name sounds in her mouth.

“You’re… not gonna have a hangover in the morning.”

Maria groaned, “another?”

“I wouldn’t care at all if this place burned down… and sorry to say DeLuca, you really don’t have an ear for the blues.”

Maria nuzzles her face against the pillow, stifles a drunken snickering. She doesn’t let go of his hand but he’s pretty sure there’s no grand psychic fine tuning going on as she intertwined his fingers into hers.

“Tell me something true,” and there’s that searching look again, before her eyes close shut.

Michael knows he shouldn’t say it, but he does; “you make Roswell bearable when not much else can.”

“—are you like me?” she asks, drowsy and drifting before he can dredge up another truth. “Are you? 'Cause I thought… was hoping…”

And Michael can’t know what she means, her features going soft and quiet. He gently pulls his hand away and wants to believe all over again that Maria can see him, all of him. That he’ll never have to say it.

More than that, he wants it to work both ways.

Outside, Michael can see headlights coming and going along the highway. He wonders which lights will dare to stop at the Wild Pony, belligerent and clueless to what unearthly force was waiting for them. In the meantime, he’ll bring Maria a glass of water and leave a bucket to puke in, checking in on her every hour until sunrise.

* * *

 

“Is that a walk of shame I see, DeLuca?” Michael chides in the morning as she shambles in with her head hung, hair wild and makeup rubbed away. “I promise I was a perfect gentleman.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Who’s helping himself to my kitchen?”

The evidence is everywhere. He hadn’t slept a wink and took to helping himself to the Wild Pony’s backroom stores when he got bored of one-man pool. Found an abandoned crock pot still running from the night before with a perfectly good chili sweating out green hatch peppers. He may have splattered oil everywhere that he hadn’t left a dusting layer of flour, but it was well worth the fried egg and tortillas chips topping her breakfast bowl.

“If I learned anything from my meth addled foster mother, it's that leftover chili is the perfect hangover cure.”

Maria ignores him, strides past him to the wall of the profane and banned and rips his picture down. There’s a tired, unreadable expression to her face.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Everyone's always welcome at the Wild Pony.” It’s a practiced slogan, something she’d say into the landline for takeout orders. Her smile is forced and none of it has to do with her hangover.

Michael looks down at the breakfast bowl and realizes that as olive branches go, it feels meager and empty.

“So that's it? No more questions? No more pushing?”

Maria is still ignoring him, parcelling out what looks like horseradish for the world’s most disgusting bloody mary.

“We open at noon, Guerin, if we ever open again” she adds, pouring the thick red tomato juice in with an ungodly amount of vodka. It’s as good an indication as any that the matter is dropped. It’s what he wanted, before all of this mess got in the way.

He should take the win. Just accept it as well as the defeated look on her face. It’s a small price to pay. It would be for the best.

“Since when do you give up without a fight, DeLuca?” he derides.

Maria laughs. It’s bitter. Maria DeLuca does not do bitter.

“Since I run the only progressive bar in any county in any direction and it keeps bringing bigots to my door. Since my bouncers have parole officers who can’t know the only place they can find work in an establishment with a liquor license. Since half my kitchen staff are undocumented and need to hightail it out of here when the cops come. Since I thought I could help people. Thought I could keep them safe…” Maria purse her slips, exhales hard, “I mean, how stupid could I be? This is Roswell, after all.”

“None of this was your fault, Maria. We can still fix up the rest of the place. It’ll be just like before.”

“Hopeless optimism isn’t your color, Guerin.”

“So you’re just giving up?”

“You say that like I’m the one person on earth who’s not allowed to!”

“Because you’re not,” he insists. It’s a ridiculous, exasperating assertion. But it feels true all the same. It makes Michael want to get in her space, shove his hands into hers, pull her close and make her feel how true it is; make her feel it the way only she can. Maria goddamn DeLuca doesn’t quit.

“I get called a lot of things, Guerin. ‘Fraud’ and ‘liar’ and ‘freak’. But ‘crazy’, that’s the one I never let it sink in too deep. Never let it stop me from trying. From trying the same thing over and over and over. Only now I feel it. I feel the crazy. Because my friends stop talking the second I walk into the room. When I ask about it, I get answers that insult my intelligence; telling me I’m imagining it. But now I really am seeing things that didn’t happen…”

Michael’s stomach drops.

“And my only defense is my psychic power no one really believes in, telling me I still have a grip on reality…” Her voice trails, she’s run out of steam, run out of faith. “It’s the sort of thing crazy people do. It's— it’s what my mother does.”

Michael had been studying extra-atmospheric travel for the better part of ten years now. Had dedicated sleepless nights and countless hours, days, weeks. He’d wondered and theorized what the big empty would feel like if he ever found the pieces to shuttle his way through, his way home. Calculated when and where the irreversible motion would become the point-of-no-return. When his trajectory was set for better or worse, his path unalterable.

He’d never imagined he’d feel it with both feet on the ground.

It’s why when Maria tries to turn away he stops her. Pulls her too close and catches her wrists when she tries to pull away. Recites too loud, too clear; “an object at rest will remain at rest until?”

“Guerin, I don’t—”

“Just say it, Maria,” he’s just short of shouting.

“Until another force acts upon it! Why? What does that matter?”

Beside them, the inertia shatters. The still surface of the pool table ricochets apart as the racked stripes and solids move with impossible synchronization, forming a line behind the cue ball. The balls shuttled back and forth in a mockery of Newton’s cradle before Michael bends the locomotion into a snaking figure-eight, just to erase any and all plausible deniability. If he’s going to show her what he is, he may as well do it with all the cavalier nonsense she’s always accused him of.

And if levitating a pool stick to knock the eight ball into the corner pocket seems like overkill, so be it.

She doesn’t ask questions after. Not like he expects. Doesn’t wrench herself away or any of the other things he’s bracing himself for. Instead gives him a command like only she can; “Do it again.”

“…what? With the pool balls or?”

Maria stalks away from him, a fluster of movement. Grabs the bottle of vodka off the counter and holds it level with her eyes before she drops it—

—it never hits the floor.

Her eyes follow after it as it spins in a gravity of Michael’s own making. It floats up and up until it hits a beam of morning light streaming in from the rafter windows. The glass catches alight, scattering a prism of color over everything, over Maria.

And she's beautiful just then when she smiles. “You've been cheating at darts for years, haven’t you?”

It's not the accusation he was bracing himself for.

Michael nods. “Well, you've been cheating at poker.”

* * *

Michael drives like hell. Peels out the parking lot too fast, turning too wide down main street. Hauls past Max out on patrol and sends one clear, simple message through the ether to slip into his brother’s ear: _Do not follow me._

He left Maria behind when her openers arrived. Coaxed her into eating his _mea culpa_ breakfast and letting her hired help get to work. She hadn’t asked any questions. Not a single one. Just stared and smiled with a brightness he swears left sunspots in his eyes.

Michael doesn’t let his foot off the pedal. He drives past the lay-by leading to the airstrip, where Alex was marching to whatever military tune Uncle Sam whistled. Drives past exit to the crash site and the safety of the pods. Turns instead onto Route 9, past the Long Farm and the Frederick's Homestead. The image of those girls limp, lifeless bodies unearths itself in his mind, hurts the same way the bruise on Maria’s cheek did. All things he could have stopped if he’d only been there—

Michael is well past the homestead when every tire on their trucks, tractors and four-wheelers contracts and expands in rapid succession. The rubber rupturing and a shock-wave of over-pressure kicking gravel and dirt.

He doesn't feel any better, after. Still as exposed, raw, and left waiting for the next bomb to drop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Partially inspired by and written for my 101 Shots challenge, based on prompt #75: Fall.
> 
> Happy _Dia de Maria_ and happy Cinco De Mayo to all celebrating! Thanks for reading!
> 
> Title and lyrics courtesy of Citizen King and the year 1999, ~~and not the band Sublime as often thought by anyone who remembers this song~~.


	2. Chapter 2

Two missed calls from Max, a voicemail from Isobel and a follow-up text from Noah reminding him to call his sister back. Michael ignores all of them for days at first. Then a week passes and then another and Isobel wrangles him into something social. Thinks that she's doing him a favor by picking the wild pony.

“You hate all my favorite spots,” she reminds him in the parking lot.

“Because _Bean Me Up_ and the _Venus Vegan One-Stop_ are were good Roswellians go to die slowly, not hang out.”

Isobel looks down her nose at the _Pony’s_ barfront. “Well, you know Max doesn't want us at the Crashdown after _last time_.”

Michael hasn't forgotten how hard his brother punched him for so much as daring to scare Liz Ortecho. Michael wonders how Max would react to Maria knowing.

He already knows how Isobel would.

They sit out in the pleather covered back booths, as far away from Michael's usual spot as possible. The windows have all been repaired in his absence and there's a fresh coat of paint and new woodworking. Michael bites back the flare of jealousy knowing Maria put someone else to work at the Pony. Isobel groans loudly about the lousy seating and garage rock playing from the jukebox, missing the no doubt delightful coffee house covers of the same songs playing at Bean Me Up. Isobel raises her spirits by badgering a waitress about seeing a wine menu Michael knows does not exist. Making it all the stranger when she returns with a glass of wine on the house and a handwritten note of the two wine selection: red and white.

“Why is Maria DeLuca doling out her very best customer service all of a sudden?” Isobel asks, eyeing the glass with deep reservation. It's not often she deems the Wild Pony worthy enough to stroll into, but it is even rarer that Maria deems Isobel worthy of acknowledgment, let alone a freebie.

“Maybe it's because I'm her very best customer,” Michael offers.

Isobel scoffs, flips her hair. “No. Absolutely not. You're not allowed to take up with her. I mean it, Michael. I'm putting my foot down.

“I'm gonna pretend you did not just say that.”

“You don't believe in all her hippie-dippy peace, love, and understanding,” Isobel scoffs, downing the glass. “Besides a penchant for alcoholism, what more do you two have in common?”

Blues. Classic cars. Texas hold em. Fleecing tourists. The annual desert drag race that neither Isobel or Roswell’s finest need know about.

“Nothing at all,” Michael agrees, with a shrug.

When a round of brews arrives, there's a coaster stuck to the bottom of his with loose curling letters inked to the back;

 

> _Meet you at midnight._
> 
> _— M._

Across the way, Maria gives him the slightest of waves, a sideways smirk, and gets back to work.

* * *

He lets her in when the knock comes at the side of his trailer, but not before making a show of checking the periphery for movement, for shadows. “No one's with me, Guerin,” she tells him, offensive clearly taken. They stand there for a moment too long, her with one foot in the door, him with the spread of his arm and broken hand across the doorway. Michael eases inside and closes the rickety metal door behind her with his mind— or slams it, really. Harder than he needs to and latches it in place with a loud echoing thunk.

Maria is unimpressed. Telekinesis already falling under the tired stash of tricks Michael kept up his sleeve. “If you're done puffing up your chest, I brought beer,” she pushes past him, sets a six pack on his collapsible table. Makes herself right at home on his couch ignoring the fact that she’s never set foot here before. Michael wants it to grant him some kind of home-field advantage; to put her out of her element and into his.

But she slots right into the cluttered makeshift space of him and his. From the bohemian regalia of her flowing skirt fanned out over his cushions, to the Rolling Stones shirt tied off at her waist, and her red-lined mouth daring him to say what she knows he’s thinking; “You keep looking at me like the world’s about to fall out from under you.”

The fact that he’s still standing, leaning against the trailer wall with his arms crossed and eyes low is probably what gives her that impression. It’s maybe the longest they’ve ever gone without Michael holding up his end of the conversation; no quips, no comebacks. It feels entirely unnatural, this apprehension of her supplanting a decade's worth of whatever the hell they had been together. The unfinished thing he had only just realized they’d been building to.

“Well you know what they say,” he starts, “it’s not the fall that kills you.”

Maria sighs. Sits back and waits for him to look her in the eye. “I haven't told anyone. And I'm not going to.”

“Why not?”

“I kind of thought that would go without saying.” Maria is fiddling with her keychain and the novelty Tweety Bird bottle-opener that hangs from it. Michael spares her the time and clicks the lid off himself, watching the metal cap sail through the air of its own accord into the sink.

Maria pinches the bridge of her nose, but there's a slight smile. “Look. I get why you're on edge, Guerin. I do. And I'm sorry that I've been avoiding you.”

Funny, Michael thinks, sinking into a folding chair to give in to the allure of free booze. He thought he'd been avoiding her.

“Its just once it all set in, I was angry.”

“Angry?” Michael repeats.

“Pissed off, actually,” she confesses with a deep breath as if trying not to spiral back into that particular sentiment. “And I didn't want to show up here and say something I couldn't take back. It’s just been so long, and I got so tired of it, you know?”

“DeLuca the hell are you talking about? Tired of what?”

“The frauds, the liars… ” she trails off, sips from her bottle.

“That's the entire population of this town, DeLuca. Minus present company.”

“You know what I mean, Guerin.”

“I really don't.

She sighs. “Do you know how many so-called card readers I've met? How many clairvoyants and mediums and fortune tellers?” she continues, “the answer is hundreds. Maybe more, since I lost track of the grifters and the amateurs who could barely pull it off. But none of that ever bothered me. Or didn't until my mom started getting sicker… And once she was gone I thought I’d just be alone in it. That there would be no one else like me.”

“So imagine my surprise when a real psychic finally walks into my bar.”

“Wait. DeLuca—”

“Ten years, Guerin. Ten years you've been coming to my watering hole. Sitting at my bar top. Drinking away, talking about trans-ams and stripped deck poker. Watching me do my readings, laughing when I talked about auras… and you never once thought to say, ‘hey DeLuca, cool party trick,’” she scoffs in a terrible approximation of his voice, “‘lemme show what a real psychic can do.’”

“Maria, I'm not—”

“Right,” she mocks with a held vowel and a handwave. “You don't subscribe to that label. You levitate things with your mind, Guerin. Call a spade a spade.”

Michael scrubbed at his eyes. Unsure if he was feeling relief or dread. Somewhere high above him, past this earthly hemisphere into the cold conspiratorial abyss, the universe opened up. It laughed as it coughed up the one and only easy out he’d ever been given. Every instinct in him said the same thing at once: take it and run.

“Alright then,” Michael throws his hands up, “I'm a spade.”

Maria nodded with a tilt, tipping her bottle to clink together with his. “maybe more of a swiss army knife” and Michael chalks that up to the top five compliments Maria had ever given him. Doesn’t say as much because he’d never want her knowing he had a running tally.

Two more drinks in she asks him, “did you really think I'd rat you out? To what, make a quick buck?

“My drinking keeps a roof over your head so I hope not.”

She nods along, “that and it's not like Guinness World Records or Ripley's would have really cared.”

“Was kind of more afraid of you siccing the CIA on my tail, accusing me of being an alien.”

Maria rolls her eyes.

* * *

The following days are otherwise ordinary. Or as ordinary as a get-out-of-military-detention-black-site-free card could possibly be. Michael picks up shifts and hunts through crash sites and runs his standard calculations. He answers Isobel’s furious texts and indulges Max’s moralizing ego. Sells parts that aren’t his to sell and trades whatever he’s got for the paltriest of clues about 1947. Tires and toils over blueprints in the isolation of the bunker before emerging, drifting to his favorite haunt. It's when he walks in through the swinging doors he finds one part that’s changed: the way Maria beams at him from behind the bar; that’s new.

It wasn’t a lie, or so he tells himself. Just her reaching the wrong conclusion. Just him not dissuading her. It’s why he still doesn’t tell Max or Isobel. Why he doesn’t nudge Liz along to clueing in her best friend. Why he keeps out of Alex’s way on the rare occasion he and Valenti cross his path. Because as far as Michael is concerned the universe really did owe him one. Owed him the easy painlessness packaged in the shape of Maria DeLuca. Owed him the languid cadence of her voice, whisper-soft in their shared secret coiling tight in his chest. Owed him getting used to the sight of her in the daylight; off work, at no one's beck and call, somehow feistier when she lays eyes on him laying eyes on her. It happens all the more with Michael lingering in the city limits. So often he takes to keeping a fresh shirt in the back of his truck— one of the nicer ones he washes at Isobel’s place with the detergent he steals from Max’s place, free of worked-in motor oil and dust.

Michael starts to believe it a little himself; how if he were psychic it would explain how he can always sense when she's rounding the corner, or just about to walk through that door. Or how at other times, the way she moved towards him made him feel irrationally certain she was one of his. Able to push and pull the world behind her. Harmonizing her surroundings, stepping to the pulse of the desert beat and the triumphant surety Roswell never burnt out of her.

“You going my way, Guerin?” she asks.

He wraps an arm around hers. “You know it.”

* * *

Becoming a satellite to the world of DeLuca grants a front row seat he never had before. Townies treat Maria like a tourist attraction, hunting her down like America’s Most Wanted, fists full of cash and begging for a read anywhere from the bar to the curbside. Michael has no patience for it and Maria often waves him off to let her conduct business without his griping. One afternoon he leaves her plotting out a newlywed's life story; white picket fence, two story homes, a dog and a half dozen kids. Michael’s rounded the block and stopped to barter off a few pieces of ill-gotten scrap behind the general store before he makes it back to find the sideshow hasn't moved. The blushing bride still clinging to every word Maria says. Michael does appreciate the craftswomanship, how deftly and abrupt;y she sends them on their way while still being tipped extra.

“Did you hear that?” the woman gasps, giddy and clutching her wife’s arm as she passes Michael, “she knew the song we played as our first dance…”

“All roses and happily ever afters?” Michael can’t help but scoff.

“No,” Maria admits, still smiling and waving the pair off. “They aren't going to have the big busy family they think they are. Just the one kid before they realize the rest just costs too much.”

“You didn't tell them that, though.” Michael tugs at the sleeve of her into her coat. She follows him to his truck and hops inside. The offer for a ride unspoken and unneeded.

“They're in the honeymoon phase. And nothing I say can prepare them for cold reality.” Maria flips down his visor and musses with her hair, before turning back to him. “You don't look impressed.”

“You know how I feel about your horoscopes and fortune telling.” He's needling her. He really shouldn't. But he's never been able to help himself before. “How do I know you're even the real deal DeLuca? Sleight of hand, cold reads. It's child’s play.”

There's a combative glint in her eye. He’s seen it before; the one time she banned him from the Pony for two months straight.

“Flip a coin.”

He does after rifling around his pockets for a quarter. It lands between his hands where he sneaks a peek but doesn’t show.

“Tails,” she says before he can ask.

“Fluke,” Michael challenges.

“So repeat the experiment.”

Michael flips it again.

“Tails.”

“Heads.”

“Tails.”

“Heads.”

“Heads.”

Michael flips it one last time. Catches it but this time doesn't look.

“…heads?”

Michael peeks. Grins. It is heads, but the fact that she’s unsure is enough for him.

“That’s not how it works y'know,” she insists defensively. “There are limits. And a difference between being attuned to you versus being attuned to an object I've never touched before.”

“The difference being how often we touch?,” Michael drawls and Maria breaks first, tearing away to stare out the windshield.

“Hand me your deck. I know you carry it on you.”

Michael makes a show of reaching into the glove compartment, moves into her space, their noses grazing awful close before he slides back into his seat. Easy and unbothered as he tosses the deck of cards to her lap with a flick if the wrist. Maria wouldn’t let him get away with such obvious flirting if she had not already had murder on her mind. She’s attentive when she shuffles the cards in. Cocksure when she hands them over to Michael. He reshuffles them.

“Split the deck. Top three cards from the bottom half,” she dictates and Michael does. Doesn't look at them as he carefully slips them behind the sun visor. But it doesn't matter, Maria's eyes are closed.

“Jack of spades. Queen of diamonds. Two of hearts.”

“That your final answer, DeLuca?” Michael asks, innocent as a matador waving red.

Maria ignores him, climbs over the stick shift and pulls down the visor herself. The trio of cards fall in a fluttering motion and he picks each from the air with his mind. Revolving face up in midair, his three card draw matches her prediction down to the suit.

“Real enough for you Guerin?” Maria simpered, an upturned chin in victory and the spinning cards between them doing nothing to curtain her grin.

Michael turns the ignition, lets the deck fly together and stash itself in the glove compartment. “You and me are road tripping to Vegas real soon, DeLuca.”

* * *

They don’t make it as far as Vegas. Instead they end up joyriding with the windows down past the old quarry and turning off the GPS to follow old roadmaps Maria finds stashed under her seat when she slips off her sandals to put her bare feet on the dash. They find a field of flowering yucca and Mojave prickly pear other wildflowers that she teaches him the names of. As she picks and weeds through the desert brush he crouches next to her and names the topographical formations in the distance. Explains to her rapt attention how the weather patterns and mining shape the desert foundry and where better places to find vegetation might be, losing her only in the numbers and calculations of the slopes. They hike an abandoned mesa path on a whim. Him clearing the way of stone and breaking steps and grooves into the erosion so she can prance and spin her way to the top of the world. Weightless and free as if it were him carrying her.

She’s too close to the edge of the mesa when she says, “if I jumped could you—” and Michael bodily hauls her back. He loses his balance in his haste and they topple together, rolling in the dirt and the petals Maria has stashed in her pockets spilling into a bed beneath them. He’s telling her ‘no,’ over and over breathless and she laughs into his shoulder.

“DeLuca, I swear,” Michael heaves, chest still rising rapidly. “If you even think about it—”

“What if it’s like flying, though?” she murmurs into his shoulder. “Wait, can you?”

“It’s like hovering, and no. I can’t turn it inwards.”

“But you’ve tried?”

“Once and only once.” When he was a kid and Isobel really wanted to see if he could climb to the top of a pole to hang a banner for some scholastic nonsense. It had ended badly, throwing off his equilibrium and giving him motion sickness that lasted for days, to say nothing of the headache he got from Max reaming them out for using their powers at school.

“What does it feel like when you do it? Not inwards, I mean. But everything else?”

Michael furrows his brow. “It feels like math.” He laughs when she interjects a disappointed scoff. Sits up straight before he does something stupid, like kiss her. “Sorry to burst your new age bubble, but it's involves a lot of factors. Atmospheric pressure, molecular bonding, centripetal force all need to be accounted for. Ignore all of that and it’s more exploding stuff than moving anything… Gravity though; that's the thing I feel the most. The planet spins and spins and I never stop feeling it. It’s always there, trapping us. So its the first natural force to negotiate to make things— what?”

Because she’s rolled over onto her stomach, elbows holding her up and her chin in her hands looking at him in a way that makes him think gravity is pressing down on him and only him.

“Nothing. It just realized… Ten years of bartering and making fun of townies. But we never talked.”

There’s an inexplicable affront he can’t help but take. Hours and years spent talking and ribbing and laughing with her didn’t suddenly evaporate because she came close to the truth. There had been time, the worst of times when he and Max were at each other's throats and full of rage and blame over Isobel, when Maria had been the only person in all of Roswell to tolerate him. She never asked why he was so angry and alone. Just kept the brews cold and the fire burning and let him pay his way as he could. “We talked, DeLuca. We did.”

She shakes her head, unconvinced.

“It’s the opposite for me,” she says, changing the subject. “It’s not a cold, hard thing to wrap my mind around. For me being psychic is… it’s fickle and flighty and warm. Like a hand over my heart. Whispering."

"Whispering what?" Michael asks, sounding far too fond even to his own ears."

"For me to turn and look. Look closer and closer and…”

“I never believed you before,” Michael admits. He had no doubt that Maria was one hundred percent purebred human, but still the things she can do mystify him. Her perceptions flaying open the macroscopic world, boiling it down to impulse and emotion. He’d written her off before; as a novelty or puzzle he didn’t dare try to solve. But now he could say it; she was the most incredible and confounding human he’d ever met— and he’d met far too many of them.

“I wouldn’t have believed you before, either,” she tells him, assuaging his guilt. It’s a stray passing thought then, telling her the real truth. Where he might be from, how he crawled out of the light of an alien capsule and had been scrambling his way through the darkness of humanity ever since. How so few things made him want to stay on this spinning rock. But he lets the spurring confession slide when she tells him, “I’m glad we’re here now, Michael,” and “it helps knowing there’s more people like me,” and “it’s nice, not to be so alone, y’know?”

*

It isn't until a luster of stars come out that they double back and head down. The elevation of the mesa causing his left-hand tendons to act up so Maria wordlessly took his keys from him. She’s good with a stick shift, humming along with the radio. A Spanish rendition of Black Magic Woman. They’re debating a drink at the Moonshine Eatery where he could wait on her hand and foot for a change and she could scope out the competition. But Michael doesn’t want to stop. Not while Maria is waxing poetic about the waning moon and he can name more constellations than her. Doesn’t want to be anywhere not really. Not Roswell, not Vegas, or any of the places between him and the road and this woman.

* * *

“Tell me she isn't psychic, too,” Maria whispers the second they're alone, thumb hiking back at Isobel in a matronly checkered dress wooing donors and tourists. It’s a week later and they’re both trapped at a semiformal Roswell function; him because an ice cream dispenser needed fixing and her because every small business owner who wanted to stay in business needed to pretend to give a damn about church socials.

Isobel has been throwing daggers with her eyes at Maria all night, to say nothing of the pursed thin-lipped look she sends Michael.

“Of course not,” Michael lies.

“Good,” Maria says, relieved. “I'd hate to think there was something interesting about Isobel Evans.”

Michael is plotting their escape when Isobel pounces. “Didn't I tell you Maria DeLuca was off limits?” she hisses, ready and willing to follow

Michael wanders off, suddenly playing at being blind, deaf, and mute. It's not until Isobel proves very willing to follow him into the men's room that he allows himself to be cowed into a back room that's been staged for a  photo shoot or something invariably touristy.

“Well, explain yourself,” she tuts with her arms crossed over her chest.

“I'm sorry, you must be confusing me with my brother. He's taller, dumber, also the one that lets you boss him around like an invalid.”

“But look what happens when the two of you don't listen to me,” she exclaim-whispers. “Liz Orecthos happen! Max was the frontline of keeping our secret for twenty years. But he gets a little smitten and now look at us!”

Michael recognized this speech. Not by the wording but by the oration. All her riled up frantic henpecking and worst possible conclusions. It's why they broke into the Crashdown weeks ago to scare the hell out of Liz. To keep her quiet. Michael can still feel Max’s fist connecting with his face.

An errant connection strikes across his synapses, something thing he and the Fredericks have in common; frightening women in their own homes when they don't do what they're told.

Max should have hit him harder.

“Look,” Isobel stamps her foot, “just promise me that the two of you won't ride out to Burning Man or a border protest chanting Alien Lives Matters. Promise me she won't ever know.”

Michael grits his teeth.

“I am not Max. And Maria isn't Liz.”

“That's exactly right. She isn't Liz. She isn't weak at the knees looking for an excuse to forgive you and save your sad, angsting soul. She's Maria DeLuca, ready to pick a fight and hold a grudge. Once she knows the truth she's going to hate you, Michael. It's so obvious I just wish you could see it.”

Maybe it was obvious. He was a genius after all. Maybe that’s why it stung so much.

“We're done here,” he dismisses. And Maria appears; the patron saint of excellent timing.

She barely gets a snarky word in edgewise before Michael pulls her through a fire door, not caring about the alarm going off behind them or Isobel yelping behind them.

They’re well past Main Street before it registers to Michael that he’s is fuming and Maria asks if he wants to talk about it.

“I'm not angry,” Michael says.

“Even if I wasn't psychic…” Maria points to his bad hand, clenched tight and knuckles white.

He hadn’t noticed he was doing it. Only now that he tries to open his fist it is locked in place and seizing with spasms. He shoves it in the pocket of his jean jacket and doesn't lose pace. “She thinks if she gives up her hold on me and Max that—” he trails off. He isn’t even sure of the rest or what he means to say. Only that he's never this angry with Isobel, ever. This kind of rage he reserves for Max, especially when Max happened to be right about something. “I just keep trying to remind her that I'm not him. And can't tell the difference between us by now—”

“Oh, you mean the difference where he's tall, dark, and handsome? Got the soul of a poet and dreamy eyes? Oh! and the uniform.”

The silver pole of the stop sign beside them suddenly bent double into a zigzag.

“DeLuca—” Michael warns, surprised by the depth of his own irrational jealousy.

“Relax, I'm not ditching you for your parole officer. Wait, are you going to fix that?” Maria asks, casting back a stare as Michael hurries her away from the destroyed public property.

“Nope. It can stay there so you can think about what you've done,” Michael elaborates, short-cutting whatever deadpan remark she had in store.

* * *

Max texts him in the morning in full Deputy mode; _what happened to the street post on the corner of Culpepper and 3rd?_

 _Aliens did it_ , Michael texts back. Max doesn’t speak to him for a week.

* * *

Michael is knelt down feeding the firepit outside his trailer with old notebooks and sketches when her truck pulls up. Unusual so long after midnight, but not unwelcome. She's over at his place all the time, through operating hours and after. Sanders keeps confusing her with Kiki, the one other black woman who lives in Roswell, but he also keeps a washed coffee mug in the front office for her that she sips from while watching Michael sorts through the junkers and the souped-up mid-life crises.

When she climbs down from the cab of her truck she doesn't look like she's come for bad coffee. She's got her hands in her pockets, shuffling her feet over the gravel and a hesitation Michael doesn't recognize.

“Can I crash here? I know it's late—” Michael is already wrapping her in a blanket from the clean laundry hamper he still hasn't lugged inside. She curls up under it in one of his mismatched lawn chairs and watches the fire. “I had a few at the Pony before closing up,” she explains. “Thought I was okay to drive but figured I'd pull over just to be safe.”

Michael should be glad to hear it. Glad she was sound enough to get off the road. Should be happy she picked him and his trailer as her safest pitstop. It's just that he didn't believe a word she said.

It's all innocent enough, Maria rummaging through the tinder pile, running her fingers over the long hand calculations. He's sure the schematics are indecipherable; too many pieces in too many parts to put together. That and she not really looking; not the way she does at the lines on a palm or the constellations across the sky. Michael wishes she would. Wishes that the map and model of the aircraft would ink its way into her brain so clearly she knew the truth. Knew to hop out of the lawn chair and demand answers, get in his face and accuse him of everything if only so he could point out she's lying too.

“You never drink after shifts. Not unless you have a ride,” Michael points out as she folds the sheets into origami.

“Never say never,” she answers, holding out a paper flower. Michael floats it above the firepit where it cinders instantly. Fleeting and beautiful as it's maker's smile. Michael knows it will vanish if he presses too hard.

“Good thing my place is closer to the bar than yours,” he stretches out in the chair next to hers. “Even if it's in the opposite direction.”

“You caught me," she deadpans. “I wasn't head home.”

“Yeah?"

“I was off on a secret rendezvous; Wyatt Long finally won me over.”

Michael laughs in spite of himself. “Is he why you're trying to hide how shaken up you are? Because if he is, I need you to tell me.” A protracted silence falls over them before Michael presses on, losing patience. “I'm not you, DeLuca, I'm not a human lie detector.”

He wasn't even human, but that was beside the point.

“It's not all it's cracked up to be,” she counters, balling up the last of the scrap paper to add to the fire. “And it's nothing, Guerin.”

“I love hearing about nothing. Some say it's all I talk about.”

It's Maria's turn to laugh. It's all the push she needs because finally, she tells him, “someone threw a brick through my kitchen window.”

Michael sits up in his chair, both broken and unbroken fists curled tight, tense and ready.

But Maria lounges back, nonchalant as she goes on. “Think it's one of the Fredericks. They're still angry they're banned from the bar. And I'm not supposed to be telling you this, under the advisement of your favorite parole officer, who think you'll do something stupid. And you're not going to,” she emphasizes. “Because I'm not even mad about the stupid window.”

“Then what is it, DeLuca?” Michael asks, forcing down his own anger.

“It's that after the cops left, and I knew I didn't want to be alone… I drove past Liz's place and didn't stop. I knew she would want to know. That she would try to make me feel better, especially with all the crap she and Arturo put up with at the Crashdown. But… you know how you told me before that you could always feel the world turning? Can you feel it now?”

“Yeah. What about it?” Michael asks, confused by the sudden tangent.

“Do you ever wish you couldn’t do it? Couldn't feel the earth spinning, couldn’t move things Newton says you're not supposed to be able to move?”

“No,” Michael admits. Not once, not ever. Because he will hold onto every piece of him until it kills him. “Do you?"

"Sometimes. Maybe just make it so I couldn't feel people holding back, couldn't feel them lying. But I can't," Maria shrugs. "So I'll just tell Liz in the morning."

“Whatever she's not telling you, maybe she has her reasons. Good ones or she— ahh," Michael hisses, wringing out his useless left hand. A shooting pain spasms through the tendinous muscles as he tries to ride it out.

“Here,” Maria sits up, blanket sliding off her shoulders. “I forgot I brought you something."

“A new hand?"

“Almost," and from her purse, Maria produces an old shoe polish tin. Its scraped clean and repurposed, and when the lid screws off it's full to the brim with a ground-up waxen balm.

“You looking for more reasons to hold my hand again?” Michael jokes. “You know I don't do herbal remedies.”

“You break the laws of physics without blinking but aloe vera is where you draw the line?”

“It tingles,” Michael complains after the first layer, but soon his skin buzzes and a simmering warmth that seeps into his bones. Maria is diligent in her application. Every crease, knuckle and nail bed. "And don't think this means I'm forgetting about the brick in your window," he reminds her as she's rattling off instructions on how to wrap it and soak with salt and water.

“You're lucky you can even move the damn thing, Guerin," chastises him. “It doesn’t help that this hand wasn’t set properly.”

“I don't take constructive criticism.”

Maria sighs, “of course, you set it yourself.”

The pain in his hand has long since ebbed away and Michael can feel the capillaries in his digits thrumming with warmth. Maria's eyes are drifting closed for longer and longer, she looks about ready to head inside where she'll try and claim the couch but Michael won't let her. She'll take his bed and he'll take the backache. Even trade for salve soothing his busted hand. Michael gets up the guts to say it while her gaze is averted, watching the stars; “thank you, DeLuca.”

“I'm sorry,” she says slowly, boastfully. "What was that?”

It’s easier said the second time around. “I said thank you, Maria… for everything.” He flexes the digits of his left hand, uses them to cover her own. He runs his hand over her palm lines like a book, wishing he could read the language.

It's so earnest it takes them both aback. Brings them too close to the question of just what the hell they've been doing these past weeks. Spending every waking moment together, driving each other's cars, bickering who takes the couch, rehashing and rewriting old conversations into the missive of the now, comparing plights and scars only to come up with this; the two of them hanging on the edge of something. A potentiality ten years in the making.

“Keep whispering sweet nothings like that and you're gonna make me blush, Guerin.”

True to form, an artful dodge. Michael takes it for what it is; not yet.

“Then I'll have to thank you more," Michael promises and leads her inside.

* * *

“Thank you,” Michael says when she pours him a brew, chilled with a perfect cut of foam.

“Thank you,” Michael says when she stocks his fridge with Ranchero Night leftovers; beer brisket and carnitas and tamales.

“Thank you,” Michael says when she doesn’t club Isobel over the head for using ‘throwing shade’ inappropriately in a sentence.

“Thank you,” Michael says when she turns the radio dial into his favorite station in her Chevy truck while they’re driving nowhere.

“Thank you,” Michael says when she finds the Philips-head that he lost weeks ago under his trailer step, sliding it into his hand and telling him it came to her in a dream. A night when she dreamed the sky opened upside down and machines grew out of the dirt like cacti. Dreamed the world spun backward because the sun was a hubcap and the clouds were guitar strings. It is ridiculous how he holds onto the screwdriver because it's still warm from her hand. A small and insignificant thing a moment ago, lost and laying in the gravel now weighted down by the thought of him being the thread of weaving into her dreams.

“Thank you,” Michael says again, for no reason in particular save for the hell of it, for the whole of her. And like every other time she turns away muttering something back and just as she predicted, she does in fact blush.

*

“You're welcome,” Michael tells her when she's pulled herself together, spent half the night sobbing against him because her mother is under lock and key, miles away from any version of herself that Maria could recognize or understand, and she can do is whisper thanks into his arms when he doesn't let go.

* * *

A week later Liz Ortecho concocts an alien poison and Isobel thinks it’s gonna cure her ailing mind. That it'll make her human. It makes no sense whatsoever but his sister has been buckling under the revelation that Michael did not hurt those girls; that she was the culprit. So when that laboratory venom rots her from the inside out and leaves her vegetating in a pod inside the caves Max and Michael are left do what they always do. Come up with a shoddy cover story.

After delivering the bad news to Noah, neither of them can stand the sight of each other. Without her, they're just two assholes who ruined their own lives. It’s why Michael pretends he doesn't know Max is sleeping in the caves like an idiot. And it's why max doesn't stop him when he stomps off to drink so much vodka and acetone that he nearly goes blind slumped over at the Wild Pony.

It’s Maria who drives him home. Out of pity and necessity; he’s belligerent and useless to anyone but her. He sits in her truck, curled in a ball and silently seething like he’s still hiding in the basement of the right wing religious fanatics who tried to expel his demons. Tried to take everything that made him who he was, made him an abomination to God and mankind and twist him into something they could stand. The same thing Isobel had tried to do to herself.

Maria doesn’t ask why. Instead, turns the radio up and lets Michael drown in the sound of it. Her bartending candor clearly taught her that waiting for the sob stories was always a better plan of action. When she drags out of the truck he fusses about something, not ready to call it a night on one of the worst days he's ever had. But she soothes him with a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“Relax. It's hardly the first time I've dragged you home, Guerin. And no, I'm not leaving. You should know that by now.”

She gets him into bed and rubs his hair because she knows he doesn't actually hate it when she does it. She brings a glass of water and pulls a blanket over him, and it all feels so terribly familiar. A million years ago Michael tucked her in at the Wild Pony, lying through his teeth and wanting nothing more than to take back what she saw during the bar fight. All so they could go back to being rival shit talking drinking buddies. And now, watching the blue outline of her bustle around his trailer to bring him a bucket to puke in, he’s sure he loves her.

And he knows he can't take that back, either.

“I’m sorry about Isobel,” Maria says. “Rehab isn’t easy.”

Right. Isobel. His dying sister. What was it Isobel had said?

_Once Maria knows the truth, she's going to hate you._

Isobel hadn’t even known which truth. But she hadn’t been wrong.

*

In the morning she’s still there and Michael has to ask the question: “Why am I not wearing pants?”

“Don’t look at me,” she tosses out, rifling around his fridge. “You kicked them off all by yourself. Fell out of bed, too.”

“You haven't asked any questions,” Michael says, pulling on the nearest jeans he can find.

“This town is full of gossips, Guerin. Everyone’s talking about Isobel.”

“Not about that. I mean. The last time one of us got this wasted—”

“You confessed to being a psychic and hiding it our whole lives?”

“I never said psychic,” Michael interrupts. He never says it. The only thing easing his conscience some says. “But I’m saying— You haven’t tried to read my palm since then.”

“Don't need to,” Maria gives up on the perishables in his fridge and grabs her keys. "I already see you, Guerin. Now get up, if we hurry we can get the solar side up special at the Crashdown.”

“You so sure about that, DeLuca?” Michael waves her off, “not about the eggs, DeLuca.” Michael leans in close, doesn't get her room to look away, “I mean me. Why are you so sure about me instead of everyone around; Liz and Alex and Valenti—”

“Guerin, I'm sure about you, because,” Maria bites her lip, "because I think deep down I always kind of knew we were the same. That we were gonna end up—”

“—here in my shitty trailer?”

“Exactly.”

* * *

The Ranchero Dinner is scheduled for the end of the day and Michael promised to fix those floorboards before someone finally falls through. It’s why he’s there before open on a Sunday, slacking off and levitating push brooms across the floor for Maria's amusement. She marvels at his nonsense, chuckling to herself, “of all the gin joints in all of Roswell, he walks into mine.” And Michael hadn't realized they were taking it slow for any particular reason, or at least he hadn’t realized it sober. But there is slow enough and then there’s time enough. Time for Michael working his way around the counter and winding up his courage and pulling her up so he could lean down and press his mouth to—

Behind them, the door opened. They pull apart as Max walks in and the brooms fall to the floor.

*

Max drags him outside through the back door into the dimming night. Maria tries to intervene, rattling off some half-plausible explanation but Michael waves her off, already knowing what to expect. Like all of their greatest hits, the argument goes nowhere.

“How could you be this damn irresponsible?” Max rages, in a fit that would make Isobel proud. "I forgave you the crap out at the Frederick's place—”

“I wasn't aware I owed you an apology,” Michael shouts right back.

"You never had a problem demanding one out of me!” The neon signage hanging off the Pony flickers and Michael wishes Max had a modicum of self-control. "Our secret is spreading, Michael.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Liz being murdered in her own home had nothing to do—”

“What about her turning our family secret into pillow talk with Kyle Valenti?”

The street lights flickered off like the nerve he just hit. They don't power back on until Max breathes in.

“She thinks I'm a psychic, Max,” Michael offers up, a weighted shrug and impatient hand in his hair.

There’s a long pause. “What?”

“I do freaky things with my brain. It's not a stretch.”

“You have got to be kidding me. You told her you were psychic—”

"No, she assumed.”

"Either way, Maria is too close to the truth, Michael. You have to see that… Dammit, this is why the two of you are together all of the time? I thought you were just upset about Alex Manes and Kyle Valenti—” Max stops talking for once in his life when he takes in Michael's face, surprised, but not shocked. "You didn't know?”

"I had my suspicions,” Michael admits, to his brother and to himself.

It's an uncomfortable shuffle, being the accidental bearer of bad news that Michael doesn't even know to count as bad news. He isn't sure how to process it away. How he should feel about something that used to take up so much space inside him that he thought there could never be room for anything else. But there was an expansive newness inside of him. His internal axis on a tilt until he was crossing over the horizon to find more sky on the other side. Room enough inside himself for everything he felt; more than room enough for Maria.

“What are you going to do about Maria's suspicions?” Max demands, pointedly. “Eventually, she's gonna figure it out.”

“She has no reason to believe I am anything other than human. I have it under control. And maybe you would too if you had the sense to tell Liz a more inventive cover story—”

“She stole my cells, Michael!”

“Rookie mistake.”

Max throws up his hands before giving up. “You are headed for a fall here and you don't even see it.”

“Our entire lives, Isobel and I have been letting you jump off every cliff you've ever come across,” Michael says walking away, "turnabout's fair play.”

* * *

The dinner is in full swing. Bodies packed from end to end, buffet tables with steaming platters and drink moving from tray to table. Liz and Alex make an appearance, however brief. Liz updates him on the progress of her antidote in a hush-hush tone before traipsing off. Maria smiles and waves as they go. Michael's never asked her why she doesn't just demand the truth from them in the same way she is so tirelessly direct about everything in her life.  He wouldn't have spent the past weeks spinning his wheels, chasing her and running from the truth if she had. He wouldn't have climbed to the top of the Roswell mesa. Wouldn't have spent night after night collecting a tableau of roadmaps with deepening creases, covered in her handwriting. Wouldn't be riding for this fall everyone keeps talking about.

_Once she knows the truth she's going to hate you, Michael._

Losing her now would hurt. But losing her the same way Liz and Alex are, slowly and unknowingly. That would hurt worse.

He catches her between introducing the live music and leading the group prayer over the food. "You wanna get out of here?”

“Now?” She's got a dish towel over her shoulder. There's a mix up over which tamales are vegetarian. Hank Gibbons is yelling at Noah to go back where he came from instead of doling out legal advice near the punchbowl.

“Right. Later, though? I got a full tank and we can just… go. Drive until we run outta things to say.”

Maria smirks. "When's that ever happened between us, Guerin?”

“Exactly,” Michael bites his lip. He likes the new glint in her eye. Wipes a smudge of cooking flour off her cheek. "Later, when we're alone, I wanna tell you something. Just promise me you’ll listen and we can… we can go to my place or yours. Or drive back out to the mesa. I’ll even let you jump off this time.”

Maria cocks her head to the side, "but you will catch me, right?”

“I figured that part would go without saying.”

“Maria!” calls a frantic voice from the side. “Come quick! Their descending! On New York and Tokyo—”

“Who the—” Michael starts.

Maria pulls away without hesitation. “My mom.”

“She's here?”

“Of course,” Maria says, dread welling up, "it's Ranchero Night. She has to be here." Maria turns to leave, but doubles back, to tell him to stick around. "I gotta go calm her down before she gets to the second act of Independence Day. But don’t move okay? She's going to want to meet you. The only other psychic in Roswell.”

If Michael had truly been able to see the future, he would have known what that last smile she cast over her shoulder at him meant and would come to mean. Would have known it would keep him up at night; that it was going to hurt more than anything else. But lacking the faculties of clairvoyance, all Michael could do is stand there, dumb and watching across the throng of body and onlookers. He could tell Maria was the image of her mother; statuesque and warm-hued with a knowing eye. The fabled Miriam DeLuca is somehow as regal as she is frazzled, draped in flowing white with a crown of loose locks of hair. She's got wandering mannerisms, eyes that don't stay settled on Maria as she’s talking to her. She's holding her in grip and refusing to be calmed, shouting about Will Smith and invaders before she stops abruptly.

Slowly, her gaze turns and rises. Settling on one thing at last; on Michael. She doesn't blink but raises one narrow finger and points as she whispers in Maria’s ear.

Whatever she says leaves Maria shaking her head, mouthing 'no' before giving up and retreating back to Michael.

“Give me your left hand.”

“What? Why?” Michael hesitates.

“I need to read it instead of your right.”

“I thought you didn’t need to do that anymore,” he's stalling. He can't help it.

“I know, look, it’s a long boring-ish explanation about chiromancy and life-lines and heart-lines. And why the right-hand shows one thing and the left shows you another.” Maria has taken ahold of his scarred jagged hand. Her touch is soft and careful, like always. Tracing the lines there, both the natural ones and the leftovers born of damage and hate. “It’ll just take a second.  I’m only doing it because my mom swears that you're an—”

Maria stops. Silent and still and slowly, slowly forgetting to exhale.

For the first time in Michael’s life, the gravitational pull of Earth dulled down to nothing. He is unmoored, adrift, helplessly watching Maria fade away right in front of him. All in a second’s time, a light went out in the brown of her eyes, overtaken by something else. Something that left her looking like her mother. Looking as if she had seen too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's still _Dia de Maria_ in my timezone and I'm not done celebrating. So here's chapter two, folks.  
> Thanks for reading ♥ Let me know what you think!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Lizzo voice:** I BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ONE!

There’s no hugger orange Chevy parked out in the gravel lot. No tail-end sight of a fanned skirt flowing through the Pony's swinging doors. The booths are lined with regular’s faces and there's the same chicken-scratch roster for the pool table with familiar names, but none of them are who Michael’s searching for. It's hard for him not to stop and stare, to index everything _wrong_ here, everything missing. How there isn’t an air of leather and cedar oil around the bar. It only smells of hard soap and tobacco. There’s no flash of spun up color doubling around from the backrooms, armfuls of long-necked liqueurs. No one fine-tuning the night’s jukebox plays, no one purring out a lilting but raunchy rendition of _No Scrubs_. No hassle from the bouncers, no side-eye from the hostess, no syrupy shot of sweet tea poured in place of whiskey when he orders it. No one taking hold of him with silken fingers, adamant for the truth, for lies, or anything in between.

Because there’s no Maria DeLuca. Not behind the bar, not in the stockrooms, not at the Crashdown, not at the volunteer shelter, not in her rustic little rental, not on any road in Roswell.

And Michael’s the only one who seems to have noticed.

* * *

Big Jim’s working the points of egress, keeping the ‘comic-con riffraff’ out and helpfully reminding the freaks that Area 51 is in Nevada. He’s otherwise evasive and tight-lipped about his boss. “She hasn’t been in since Ranchero Night. Taking sick days, I heard.”

Slim Jim, his older, burlier brother is even less forthcoming. “Mind your own fuckin’ business, Guerin,” he tells Michael while he’s got some rowdy drunk in a chokehold. “You’ll see her when you see her.”

Her so-called friends share in the rankling underreactions. “She’s spontaneous,” Liz reminds him when they wrap up the day’s work at the hospital, “whichever way the wind blows, there’s Maria—” and Michael stomps off before she can finish that sentence. Because he still needs Liz to help save Isobel, can not afford to burn that bridge with the growing shout within him. One that blows the roof off pointing out how there’s bohemian veneration and then there’s pulling a full-blown Houdini. Disappearing into a crowded room, wrenching away from him in a pulse-pounding blur, vanishing into the goddamn night never to be seen again.

“She won’t be AWOL for long,” Valenti adds, clearly trying to be helpful and comforting in a way that makes Michael’s stomach twist. Nearly as bad as knowing the military jargon is something he’s picked up from Alex. From the way they’re tack-glued to the hip, with Alex saving their seats inside the Crashdown. “The town’ll be reduced to a smoking crater without her and Maria knows it.”

Max is his last resort. “If she were missing, she wouldn’t have told her bar managers she was taking herself off the bar schedule,” Max informs him over the phone, the second time Michael inquires about a BOLO for her plates, “all of which, she did. Now are you going to tell me what this is about?” and Michael hits END CALL, leaves his brother to the dial tone.

“She just kinda swans in and out on the regular, doesn’t she?” Jonsey Frederick chimes in the next time Michael is back at the Pony, wrangling information out of the waitstaff. Jonesy’s got a spread of slow-cooked ribs and beers in front of him, eating like a king with a greasy white napkin bibbed to the collar of his shirt. He’s all but forgotten the Do Not Serve list on which his mugshot resides. Michael casts an accusing look at Big Jim, but if the tentative shrinking service his waitress provides is any indication, Jonsey knew exactly who to strongarm to make this happen.

And Michael would appreciate the sheer gall if he had any patience left. But his sister is in stasis and Maria’s in the wind, Michael’s all out of better angels to lean on.

“You have ten seconds to get the hell out of Maria DeLuca’s bar,” Michael says with gritted teeth, sidling up to the bar and clapping a friendly hand to Jonsey’s shoulder, too hard to be mistaken.

Jonesy licks the sauce from his fingers. Behind them, an eerie silence falls over the bar. Everyone’s watching. Waiting.

“Is it really her bar if she isn’t around to stake the claim?” Jonsey asks, fully committed to the red-capped backwood caricature of himself.

“Ten… nine… eight…” Michael begins.

“It’s you she’s always running off with, right, Guerin?” Jonesy points out. “All day and all night. Amazing she could ever make a buck around here.”

“seven… six… five…”

“You don’t think she’s found some other guy to drive her truck d’ya? Rev her engine, I mean?”

“four… three… two…”

“She’s got a reputation and all. Girls like her always do.”

The pitcher of light beer connecting with the side of Jonesy’s head is almost as satisfying as shifting the bastard’s center of gravity out from under him. Jonsey’s scrabbles back in a humiliating flail, cocky and sure he can regain the upper hand but Michael’s got him by the scruff of his neck, dragging him out the swinging double doors. Because house rules are house rules, whether or not Maria’s there to enforce them; you finish what you start and you take it out back like goddamn gentlemen.

* * *

Between punches, Michael remembers the oddest things:

*

“Why'd you never get out of this town, Guerin?" she asked once, flipping through his notebooks while he retooled the scrap winders in Sander’s toolshed. There had been dusty light filtering in through the cracked glass window where Maria had found his satchel. She had grease under her nails from handing him tools and a tip tucked under what he could see of her bra strap from the dairy farmer who's truck tires she helped change.

“And go where?” he asked, half listening, half willing the rotor coil to reattach with a push from his brain.

“Somewhere… anywhere,” she offered, rocking back on her heels, leaning against the unvarnished crates. There she opened another one of his books, perused the dogeared print out of NASA article he’d left there. “Find a place you don't hate as much.”

“What's not to love about Roswell?” he asked, voice more scathing than he meant to be. The rotor coil wasn’t the problem, but something else was. He really did hate small engines. No room to work and hard to finesse with his left hand in the state it was.

“Of course you can’t just answer the question,” she muttered, handing him three flathead screws before he could even ask.

“Why do you want to know?” he says around the screws he’s then holding between his teeth, like a seamstress with a needle. Maria’s lip curled in bemused reproach, clearly appalled. 

“Sometimes I used to get… a feeling. The feeling that you want out of here. That nowhere would ever be far enough.”

“Only sometimes?” he scoffs, mouthful of metal. “Not like you never left, either.”

“It’ll take a helluva lot to run me out of Roswell,” she admitted, feather earrings tilting aside with a soft, defiant smile.

“Challenge accepted,” Michael announced before spitting the last screw it turned out he didn’t need into the scrap bucket across the floor, all without a telekinetic assist. Maria wrinkled her nose and shoved at him in disgust, called him a boar and laughed at him the way he loved.

*

He and Jonesy roll into a ditch out behind the back parking lot, all elbows and knees and fists and bloody mouths when Jonesy says “if she knows what’s good for her she won’t come back” and Max pulls them apart before Michael can kill him. 

* * *

Max is carting him off to lockup, foot on the gas, berating him with the usual spiel. “You never can leave anything alone. You could have just walked away, Michael. But you always have to make things worse. You just had to.”

Michael is leaning his head against the window. It’s cool against his skin. “To be fair, I warned him what would happen.”

Max stared him down in the rearview visor. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen now, Michael. Since I’ve pulled every string I can keeping the Longs off Arturo’s back, and the Fredericks away from Maria, now we know for sure they’ll push to prosecute. What do you think happens when they remand you without bail? You get a full medical work-up through the prison system, then we’re all screwed—”

Michael can barely hear him. Opens his eyes slowly and sees it. The modest signage outside a succulent garden, the ground level stonework, and polished wooden benches. 

“Let me out, Max.”

“Why would I?”

Michael braces against the door. “Stop the car or I will.”

“Michael, you’re not going to—”

The car halts with a jarring skid. The seats lurch forward, the impact-resistant windows shudder. The backseat door that normally doesn’t unlock from the inside pop open as Michael’s twists the cogs with his mind.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Max demands, pushing him against the trunk of the car before Michael could make any headway. “Where do you even think you’re going?”

“There,” Michael points, up half a block behind them at the _Sunset Mesa Assisted Living_ facility.

“You’ve lost it,” Max says, shaking his head incredulously. Takes his hands off of Michael to pace up and down, neurotic enough that it's like Isobel was right there with them. “Michael, look at you!” He gestures up and down to Michael’s blood-streaked shirt and dust ridden pants. “I didn’t know I needed to be _this_ worried about you.”

“The day I need you worrying about me, Evans—”

“Is every day of your life!”

Michael swallows back his retort. Max always won these exchanges with his big brother complex. Michael learned to stop fighting it and accept the backhanded love years ago. “I need to get to Maria, Max. I can't waste any more time. Not a night in lock-up, not another second fighting here with you.”

Max says nothing for a moment. Leans back against the patrol car with his arms crossed. “How much does she know? Because if when we get Isobel back, the military swoops in to throw black bags over our heads I’m gonna be real pissed off.”

Michael sighs, realizing he can’t answer that question. “I have no idea what Maria knows or doesn’t. But I need to find her. To fix this.”

“And how do you intend to do that?”

“Think about it, Max,” Michael says as if it were obvious. “If you need to find a psychic, ask another psychic.”

“That makes zero sense,” Max calls after him, Michael already moving, ready to plead his case to Miriam DeLuca.

* * *

Getting into the Roswell adult care nursing home is easier than it should have been. He talks his way in so easily it would have made Isobel proud and left Max aghast over proper security procedures. An orderly at the check-in counter leaves him with a paper cup full of tepid water and offers him armchair next to the bulletin board. There are postings and clippings about everything from aquatic yoga to the free wi-fi password. It reminds Michael to check his phone again for the fiftieth time, despite knowing what he won’t find. The screen is cracked from his tussle with Jonesy Frederick, but otherwise nothing new, no responses from Maria. He shoves the thing back in his pocket, and waits.

*

“I used to call Rosa all the time after she was gone,” Maria confessed over sips to her glass, long after Michael’s shirt had soaked through with her tears, her exhaustion. They trade shots of whiskey and nuzzled her head to the crook of his arm. “A force of habit, I think, or denial… I’d just wake up in the middle of the night and forget she wasn’t there anymore. Her voicemail would play and I’d be halfway through telling her something pointless and silly and how she should call me back… and then boom. It would hit me. But eventually they disconnected her number and I learned to stop calling, y’know? That helped. It hurt but it helped. Because it felt final. I miss that sometimes.” When Maria reached over to take Michael’s next shot for him, her mother’s necklace slinked down from where it was tucked into her shirt, shimmering in the low light. “Sometimes I just wish people would either stay or stay gone. I don’t know what to with the in-between. I don’t know how to miss anyone who’s still right in front of me.”

*

“I've been expecting you,” Mimi says when the orderlies let him in, never looking at him. She’s propped up in a sterile-looking bed with far too many pillows. The walls surrounding them are filled with hanging doilies and knitted drapes, vintage festival posters, and aging polaroids. She hasn’t looked at him once. “Please, sit down.”

Michael looks, but there isn’t a chair anyway to be found. He remains standing. 

“I’m looking for your daughter,” he starts. He’s unsure of it the wrong word or wrong approach could set her off, confuse her, leave her raving about Will Smith like Maria always she did. “She and I— we’re friends, and I haven’t heard from her in a while.”

Mimi’s eyes dart to him, finally. Sharp and clear, but darkening. “You’re no friend of my Maria.”

Michael flinches, jams his hands in his pockets. “I just need to make sure she’s okay. That’s all I”

Mimi doesn’t respond. Only smiles, tilting her head just like her daughter. She rummages around behind her mountain of pillows, pulling out a wad of yarn and something shaped like a cross.

"A god’s eye," she tells him, holding it out for the taking. 

In his hands, the craft is fashioned out of scrubbed clean chopsticks and woven and thick green, white, and red thread. He recognizes it from the back office of the Wild Pony, from the kid’s table at Ranchero Night. Maria could spend all night teaching the kids to wind and weave. Mimi watches Michael watching her back, before he begins to wrap and spin the thread. Delicate and tight, over and under, back and around.

Mimi smiles, pupils following his stiff moving hands. “For some people, a god’s eye is a shield. For others, they’re offerings.”

Michael doesn’t know how or why, but he knows he’s being tested. “And what do you use them for?”

“I picked out the colors myself,” she tells him, ignoring his question. “The colors of my husband’s flag,” Mimi droned on. “Green is for order. The white is for clarity. And the red,” she stops, the very color wrapped around the digits of Michael’s good hand. “Red is love. But you already know that with an aura like yours. All bright and crimson all around you like a flame… and my Maria, the moth.”

Michael lowers his hands, stops weaving. “I just need to know where she is.” 

“The colors aren't meant to overlap,” she leans in, taking the god’s eye from his hands. She pulls at a line of yarn woven the wrong way together. “They have to be separate. They cannot touch.” Mimi keeps pulling and does not stop. The colors unspool and the knots come undone. “People walking along the crevasse always fall in eventually… if they walk far enough. And when they fall, they fall into worlds and hurts that do not belong to them.”

“I didn’t ask to be here,” Michael responds, defensive and tired. “Hell, I didn’t ask for Maria either. She just happened to _me_. So if anyone fell into anything it wasn’t her.”

Mimi regards him. Nods her head. Spins her handicraft in deft fingers, righting the colors once again.

“There can be night, and there can be day,” Mimi stares out the window at the sinking past the horizon. “But the thing between them both is… fleeting. You can’t hold onto the moonrise. You can’t hold onto the dawn.”

“You could write for fortune cookies,” Michael snaps, scrubbing at his face. This wasn’t any use. It was hopeless; spinning in circles with a woman already so lost. He turns to leave. She’s still fiddling with her god’s eye, humming something under her breath. But he has to stop himself. Has to double back just to say it once, aloud;

“For what it’s worth, I'd never let anything happen to her. I would never have hurt her, not if I can help it.”

“There are many who would,” Mimi whispered, eyeing the red threads at her fingertips. “It won't be long, after they've wrangled up your kind. Then they will come for hers. For mine. And they already know.”

“Know what? Missus DeLuca?”

“It never stops. The men in masks. The men with badges, guns, and orders. They tell me its the medication but I know. I’ve seen it. When you’re gone, they will come for her. Bury her in the desert and no one will ever hear her voice again.”

No. No. No. Michael repeated to himself. She’s sick. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. How else could she be so conversational, talking about her own daughter, about Maria. 

“You’re not well, Missus DeLuca. You should rest.” His voice sounds brittle to his ears.

“You shouldn’t,” she warns him. “They’re too close.”

“What does that mean? If you know where Maria is—”

Mimi clocked her head to the side. Eyes owlish and strange. Before Michael can give in to the fear overtaking him, Mimi is up and out of bed with her nightgown swaying around her. She takes his hands in hers. Its nothing like the way Maria holds them, soft and curious. Mimi’s grip is too tight, scratching, searching. She checked under his nails for the oil and grease, followed the scars along his left hand. 

She tuts her tongue and beams at him. “You look like a fine young man. I should introduce you to my Maria.”

All Michael can do was stare. Pity and panic each forcing down the other before Mimi’s eyes focused ever so much. “With calluses like those, you work with your hands, yes? Odd jobs and such. You must find all sorts of things; people and places and pieces.”

It was as much of an answer as Michael was going to get. He’d already wasted too much time. He backed away as slow as he could, doesn’t bother to say goodbye and neither does Mimi. She only holds her god’s eye up to her face, obscuring her left eye as she watches him, humming _Black Magic Woman_ over the sound of the air conditioning.

* * *

Michael races to the junkyard and the auto lot and down to the sand quarry and back. He burns through a tank of gas and ruins the track on his tires but he can’t stop. Chasing down every odd job he'd ever had anywhere, interrogating anyone with eyes to see is all he has. The vague words of warning, the threat Mimi had echoed rotating through his head like an engine haywried. It kept Michael running on fumes, but so be it. 

He’s back at the Sanders Auto lot for the fourth time looking for a clue when Sanders hollers from the front office about harassing customers. Phoned in complaints and whatnot. “You lookin’ to get fired?” Sanders hobbles past, eyes cloudy and knees bent.

“Looking for something,” Michael says, hands in his pockets wrapped around his lucky screwdriver. The one she dreamt about.

“Man the phones ‘til I get back,” he tells Michael, fumbling around for the keys to the tow truck. “Have to go pick up Kiki in that Chevy of hers.”

Kiki. Who owned a Buick Fastback, not a Chevy. Who was so old fashioned and set in her ways at sixty years old that her husband never let her drive, let alone breakdown in need of a tow. Kiki, the only other black woman in Roswell that Sanders had ever met and the bastard was so blind and deaf he still couldn’t tell them apart, in person or on the hotline.

“Give me the keys,” Michael says quickly, heart beating a tattoo to his chest. Because no.  No fucking way. Maria DeLuca wasn’t parked on the side of the highway with her hazard lights on, waiting for a tow truck of all things. Not while Michael was killing himself dreaming of the worst. “Where is she on the interstate?”

“That’s need-to-know information,” Sanders wags a finger. “And she wants anyone but you to bail her out. She was pretty damn loud about it—”

Michael spins around, halfway up the step ladder into the tow cab. “Since when do you care what the customer wants?”

Sanders mulled it over, scratching at his mustache before tossing over the keys to the rig.

* * *

The first thing Michael does after he pulls to the shoulder is hop down from the cab, arms raised like she might shoot. Loss of life and limb was always on the table with an angry Maria DeLuca. And this far surpassed the shortlist of things guaranteed to incur her wrath. No matter how nonchalant she appears, leaned up against the side of her truck, smoking something less than legal in the moonlight.

“Anyone but you,” she says, more to herself than him. “I told Sanders to send anyone but you.”

“The old man’s deaf as he is blind,” Michael steps forward, slow like his life, like everything depended on it, “he can’t be trusted.” 

Maria rolls the filter between her thumb and forefinger, half chuckling, “really… _trust_?” But he’s inching closer, taking her in. In the longest hours since she had been gone, since she read his broken hand, he’d thought he’d never see her again on this damn planet. And now, everything about her is a revelation. The sound of her breathing, the outline the starshine strikes out around her. Even her red rimmed eyes and smudged makeup, her mussed hair and wrinkled clothes are wrinkled. She’s got on the same jacket and shirt that she wore days ago at the Ranchero Dinner, only the blouse is turned inside out. She doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping, and Michael wants to tell her neither has he. Wants to tell her all he’s done is think about what he would say to her. How to tell her the truth if he could find her, be alone with her.

But the grim set to her lips. She’s clutching her keys too tightly in her fists. A bandage that wasn’t there before wrapped around her forearm and while Michael nearly staggers under the burning need to ask, he turns instead to her truck. Raps his knuckles against the hood of her truck, something he knows how to repair.

“No flat tire. No smoking engine,” he observes, “which means she’s not overheating. Any sputtering? Her brakes grinding?”

“She just quit on me,” Maria explains, watching the distance for traffic that wasn’t coming, “right in the middle of the road.”

“We’ll get her moving again,” Michael promises, popping the hood. Maria shuffles away where he can’t see her on the cracked asphalt towards the trunk, shivering in the night air.

Her affinity for the candid has always been emblematic of her chosen career and renegade heart. The skillsets of the bartender and the fortuneteller overlapping; knowing what to say and how to say it, when to listen and how to hear for the unspoken. Michael wonders what she hears between them now in the cold night air, in this dead-end silence save for the scrap of metal on metal as he guts around the old engine, checking the spark plugs, the vacuum lines, the fuel injectors.

“It's dark out here,” he extemporizes when it is too much to bear, “I could use a light."

Her footfalls sound doubtful, but she knows exactly where to find his flashlight in the toolbox by his feet. Isn’t afraid to stand over his shoulder, eyeing him hard. But it’s something, a good sign when she asks; “what happened to your face?” It comes out a whisper against her better judgment. Michael’s not sure how he’s so certain of that, only that he is. He had more or less forgotten that state Jonsey had left him in. There’s till blood down his shirt and a fresh bleed under his ear.

“Bar fight,” he clarifies, returns a question of his own; “how far out did you take her? Know you’ve got people in Memphis and Wichita, but that’s too far to go without a tune-up, so…”

“Spit it out, Guerin.”

He takes his shot, dumps the wrench he’s holding to the asphalt and turns to meet her head-on. If it was over, let be over. But he has the chance he was gonna fight. 

“I looked everywhere for you, Maria! I’ve been out of my head, tearing Roswell apart trying to find you. And you, you just ran! Took off scared, took off running like I’ve never seen you run from anything in your life. Like you were scared of me—” Michael’s voice breaks off. For a moment, neither of them can look at each other. “No one knew where you were. Your mother made it sound like you weren’t safe, like someone was out to hurt you—”

“Why—” Maria startles, “Why would you go anywhere near her?”

“She told me where to find you—”

“Bullshit,” Maria spits, “she doesn’t know where she is half the time.”

“She hinted,” Michael concedes. 

Maria is not convinced. “Yeah, also hinted that you weren’t…” Maria doesn’t finish. Pulls away and looks up at the sky like a UFO will fall from the sky and erase this moment from the world. It never comes. “She told me you were a liar. And she was right.”

“I never lied to you,” Michael tries, weak and unsure even in his own ears.

“Did you tell the truth?”

“The truth is… the truth is complicated.”

Maria scoffs. 

“It is. It’s complicated and fucked-up and sometimes you have to keep it to yourself no matter how much you don’t want to. Because the real truth is you spent all that time looking at my hand,” he held up his right, whole and hale and healthy, the one she had first played her tricks with, the one that tapped out the beat to every tune she sang, that shifted gears on their endless joyrides. “You liked what you saw in it and I didn’t want to give that up. So when you jumped to the wrong conclusion I just—”

“Just thought you’d let me make a fool out of myself for weeks? Let me feel like I wasn’t alone in this?”

“You’re not,” Michael insists. Because if he had nothing else, he had one place he could always go. To her. To Maria. She had to know it worked both ways.

“What was your plan, Guerin?” she demands before he can defend himself.

“Finding you. Fixing this. Working from there with whatever we've got, like we always do,” even saying he knows it could never be that simple. 

“No, I meant from the start. When I first asked you what happened to Alex, before Jonsey Frederick came back and busted up the bar. What was the plan, then?”

It feels like a million years ago. Not a matter of weeks. “I was gonna deny it. Deny it until it went away. Until you gave up.”

Maria huffs out a laugh. “How… unoriginal.”

Michael shrugged pathetically, not knowing what to do with his hands if he couldn’t touch her.

“But, still… a good plan. Yeah, I like it. That’s what we're gonna do,” she tells him.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means when you come to bar tomorrow, you’re just another day drinker in a town full of drunks. And when I come to pick up parts for my truck, I’m just another patron of your sad little scrap yard. Nothing more, nothing else.”

“You really believe you can do that?” Michael snaps, desperation rising. “After what you saw? After everything that we—”

“I don’t know what I saw,” she stops him. “And I can believe a lot of things, Michael… I’m just not sure if you’re one of them anymore. So please, fix the damn thing. I know you figured out what was wrong with it five minutes ago and you’re just stalling.”

As always, she’s never wrong. He numbly finds the kink in the fuel line and reworks it with his mind. A second later, he starts the engine without a key in the ignition. A smooth turnover with a perfect continuous rumble of machinery. The only sound left between them and this time he accepts her silence for what it is; an impasse.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” he says finally, watching her climb into her truck. “About what I am?”

“I know what you aren’t, Guerin.” Her eyes are dead ahead, fixed on the low-light of Roswell in the distance. “You’re no friend of mine. You can’t be.”

* * *

It’s not that he expected her to fall back into his arms. He just expected a different kind of fight. The knockdown, dragout kind where she doesn’t hand him everything he no longer wants. But it happens, just the way she said it would, like any other one of her too apt predictions. She’s there she is behind the bar all night, every part of the _Wild Pony_ neatly in place. She snarks at her other customers, serves beers, doesn’t linger too long when she serves him. 

He hates it.

Hates the feel of the one-sided reminiscing, how everywhere he looks, he's  revisiting tokens of time together. The lucky screwdriver he keeps in his jacket, the roadmaps on his dash covered in sharpie circling all the places they’ve been, blues rock on the radio that he only hears in the key of Maria, the queen of diamonds and the jack of aces that Michael kept together in his wallet. He forgets the pair of cards are there until he’s wrenching money out one night and the cards spill on the bartop along with a couple of crumpled twenties.

Maria picks around the cards like she’s afraid to touch them. Takes the bills and slips them into her apron. She can’t look at Michael, just leaves him his drinks.

And he hates that, too.

“I know it’s a lot to ask, a lot to forgive,” he tells her at close, slumped deep in his whiskeys. They are the only ones around, her staff made scarce because they’re still placing bets on their boss and the-less-than-loveable town rogue. Michael has always known which side he was pulling for, long-shot or no. Standing beneath the last light of the bar, alone together, but with this culpable distance paned over his most familiar refuge, he knows the only stakes that matter are hers. Whatever the hell gets her through this. “Maybe it’s too much and I never said… I never apologized. I meant to, I just… didn’t.”

“I don’t need you to—” she starts, but there’s still that flash of hurt in her face that Michael wants gone, wants erased.

“I’m sorry, Maria. For everything.” He gathers his hat and coat, takes a long look at the place. If he ever got off this planet, his handiwork here would be all to remember him by. From the floorboards, the countertop polish. The billiard cue rack he built from scratch, along with the mounted buck's head and plated mirrors behind the neon. That, and the downturned cast of her onyx eyes.

“I’ll drink somewhere else from here on out,” he promises. “Us playing strangers… it ain’t helping.”

“Who’s playing?” she asks, reflexive, almost sounding like herself as she leans in, elbows over the counter. “I don’t know who the hell you are… and you don’t know me,” she raises one silencing finger to the protest he doesn’t have the right to make. “Not if you think I’d let good money walk out the front door all the way to Saturn’s Ring.”

Wait.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Michael,” she says, and if a faint gentle looks slips when she says his name, if a crack shows, he doesn’t let himself weigh in on what it means. Too soon to hope again. So he tips his hat and leaves his drink unfinished.

* * *

Michael is used to missing things. Things  and people and places he’s never been. Things he does not have the names for; a planet, a star system, a people, a mother and father. He's gotten used to missing Isobel’s snark the way he misses a version of Max who didn’t hate himself so profoundly. Misses the comfort of living out near the crash site before the air force requisitioned the land. Misses the feel of a guitar in his hand, the sound of Alex playing a melody back. Misses the feel of the Evans family couch that summer before junior year when the Mister and Missus left town for two weeks and he, Max, and Isobel barricaded themselves inside. Misses the days spent sleeping late in the living room, watching TV in a heap and force feeding Michael a fridge worth of home cooked meals. Misses the way she felt like all of that, every taste of a home, rolled into one person. So he figures Mimi was right at the end of it all. He’s always loved fleeting things. Things he can’t keep. Things he has no right to.

* * *

He finds out the Frederick family ban has been lifted the same way everyone else does. With the banner announcement that they’re to be the next Ranchero Night’s esteemed benefactors. Michael nearly retchs into the nearest receptacle— Max’s book filled knapsack on the table, because he reads in bars like the unbearable nerd that he is— when he realizes it's not a prank. Max thinks he’s being dramatic but Michael’s constitution for bullshit has lowered considerably; the long hours at the hospital, an overindulgence in acetone, and his left hand tensing up the way it always does when stressed. 

Because despite all the best efforts of decently intelligent Liz Ortecho, Isobel’s cure has hit another roadblock. Michael hasn’t had the heart to tell Max yet. But he didn’t need this, either.

“Forgive and forget is the night’s theme, Guerin,” Maria tells him flippantly, helping her waitresses heap on a celebratory drink order for the Frederick family circus in the back booths. 

“That’s not a theme,” Michael spits, “its a cop out!”

She ignores him, piling napkins on the platter.

So Michael does what he does best; he makes everything worse. Grabs her by the shoulders, spinning and pushing her through the door to the storeroom. The look she gives him is vile and murderous but Michael is well past self preservation. 

“You want to pretend? Fine. Pretend you don’t know your friends lie to you, hide from you. Pretend it doesn’t hurt. Pretend that you and me never happened. Pretend you didn’t see what you saw. I can live with all that.” He can’t, not really, but he’ll take it over this. Over her putting herself in harm’s way again. “But you letting those bastards back in here, letting them win—”

“Win what, Guerin? Half price drinks?”

“What about the bricks through your window, DeLuca? Him laying hands on you?” The bruise left on her face from the night of the ransacking was long gone, but fresh in his mind. Painful to touch in memory. “What’s worth forgiving all that? And don’t say its the Ranchero donation. You’ve never accepted back-patting charity before.”

“Maybe I’m tired of fighting,” she bristles. “Maybe I’m tired of having Kate Long and Jasmine Frederick thrown in my face every time I dare remind someone that Rosa was a person. Maybe I want my staff to be safe to do their damn jobs without looking over their shoulders. Maybe I just want a little peace of mind. And maybe I could have it if you would admit the Fredericks aren’t why you’re really angry here.” 

“And why am I really angry, DeLuca?” he demands, incredulous.

Maria reaches into her apron and shoves a crumpled flyer into his hands. Roswell Fellowship Al-Anon reads in bold block print at the top of a list of locations and corresponding dates. “What—?” Michael stammers.

“I know Isobel’s thirty days are up,” Maria says matter-of-fact. “And she’s still gone, still in rehab, which means she’s struggling. Meaning you’re struggling, too.”

Thirty-four days and counting. Because of course Michael had counted. Every passing hour without his sister wore on, wore him down. The numbers tallied and etched onto the back of his brain. But Maria had nothing to do with her, no reason to care.

“You hate Isobel,” Michael reminds her numbly.

“Yeah, and?” she asks, not denying it. “Look, I know the Evanses mean a lot to you—”

Michael can’t stop looking at his hands. The paper doesn’t feel legible anymore. There is a kindness here that he doesn’t deserve, that doesn’t translate. Maria has been carrying it in her pocket, carrying it for him. Maria who should still hate him. 

“But you kept track. You remembered.”

Maria sighs, like she might laugh or cry. “I remember _everything_ , Guerin.”

An unbidden flash of long nights and radio chatter, the smile she once reserved for him, all of it wells up inside him, because Michael’s always a glutton for punishment, because he remembers everything, too.

“Just stop looking for fights to pick in my bar and go to a meeting—” Her scowl eases and she bites her bottom lip. “Talk to someone… you’ll find what you’re looking for, then.” 

“Cryptic,” Michael chides shoving the flyer in his coat, feeling brazen to know she still can’t help but care. “You read that in a horoscope?”

“It came to me in a dream, actually,” and she’s ready to push her way back into the fray of a Saturday night drink rush. “And wrap that hand, Guerin. Long-suffering doesn’t look good on you.”

He ignores the henpecking. Ignores the shooting metacarpal tremor. “You still dream about me, DeLuca?” he calls after her once it becomes too much of a hardship not to slide back into their ways. She looks back at him once, not answering, but no denying it, either. 

*

Watching the Fredericks hoot and holler and catcall anything with breasts gets old fast, so Michael packs his brother in and calls it a night. They argue about which of them is sober enough to drive, and Michael rightly wins.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Max starts, face pressed to the passenger window. “But you can talk to me about it. About Isobel’s antidote. If it’s not working, I wanna know.”

“Don’t see how that helps,” Michael says, bleak and quiet. How Max knows, he doesn’t ask. It could be the residual bond with Isobel, like a phantom pain. Or maybe one between them. “Unless you’ve got a biochemical degree I don’t know about.”

Max huffs. “You don't have one of those either.”

“Liz and I will make it work,” Michael says, turning off Nolan Drive, and Max all but bruises at the sound of her name. God, he was a sappy drunk and honestly, Michael is miserable enough without it. “She asks about you, y’know.”

“Bull,” Max moans, covering his eyes from the streetlight. He’s more inebriated that Michael thought, but not so bad he needs Michael’s help to climb down from the car and walk up his driveway.

“Everyday when we go over the samples,” Michael tells him, fumbling with his brother’s keys before deciding — fuck it— he just turns the lock with his mind, “or we monitor the degradation cycles, running the calculations on the determinants in the cytoplasmic charge variability—”

“I don’t know what any of that means.”

“No matter what, she finds some way to sneak in a question. Ask me how you’re doing. She doesn’t hate you.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Max flops onto his couch, too tall and gangly like they’re still teenagers.

It’s a good question. He settles on, “to make you feel better, Max,” but it feels like only half the truth.

“Hmm...” Max says into a throw pillow Michael knows Isobel must have picked out. Everything here is far too tasteful, too artfully Max to be coordinated by anyone else but her thorough understanding of him. Max is still muttering something into the cotton, and Michael catches word of “Frederick” and “sheriff” and a muffled word that sounds like “Maria.”

“Use your grown up words, Maxwell.”

Max turns his head to the side resting his cheek on the pillow. “She kept you out of jail. Maria. She’s letting the Fredericks and the Longs back in the Pony if they dropped their charges against you.”

“What?” Michael has a hundred questions and no idea where to begin.

“Come on, Michael. Did you really think you just got away with it? No consequences? You assaulted Jonsey in front of half the town.”

“She didn’t say anything— You didn’t say anything! You didn’t think I needed to know?” he accuses.

“I’m sorry,” Max says without being sorry at all. Rolls over and rubs at his temples. “I was just as surprised as you. You made it sound like her psychic thing was the real deal. Like she knew about us. But why would she help you if she did? And besides, I wasn’t aware that we were suddenly people who talk to each other again.” 

Michael groans in frustration, sinking into an armchair opposite Max. He feels the al-anon flyer crumple in his pocket where its folded, remembers Maria’s prediction:

_Talk to someone… you’ll find what you’re looking for, then._

“I think she does know,” Michael admits. “She just… can’t admit it. The human psyche is stubborn like that… I think she also wants me to talk to you. Or join the twelves steps. I don’t know.”

Max laughs. “And why would she want us to do that? Most days not even Isobel can pull that off.”

“Well, here we are doing it, so clearly she works in mysterious ways,” Michael says, deciding he’s content to crash here for the night. He will help himself to Max’s fridge in the morning and pay him back by ironing out that sputtering engine of his. “You haven’t _found_ anything, have you?” Michael remembers to ask before dozing off. “Something you were looking for?”

Max looks up at him pointedly, stays quiet for a beat.

“I was gonna show you tomorrow, actually.”

The it in question is a low-inked internet printout of a faith healer’s advertisement. Max’s tattoo, their beacon, is deadcenter at the top margin, unmistakable save  for a few added frills.

“What do you say, brother? How do you feel about a road trip?”

* * *

The sideshow sham attracted all sorts, Michael notes, counting the license plates from every state. The crowd hails from everywhere along the stretch of the northwest to the deep south. He’d feel sorry for the suckers, really he would, but far be it from him to tell anyone where to throw their hopes around. At least, until a familiar hugger orange Chevy pulls up to the lot.

Maria climbs down, Liz in tow, and Michael knows he’s in trouble.

“If this is about your mother, DeLuca, you can find her real medicine.” They’re in line in a ramshackle tent, queued up for overpriced refreshments. 

“Guerin,” she says, sipping on a straw, “it’s been a long drive, and I’ve been looking forward to this. Don’t ruin it.”

“I don’t want you to get your hopes up—” some circus vendor of an announcer gets on a bull horn and cuts him off, tells ticket holders to report to the main teepee to see feats they will not believe with their own eyes. “I promised your mother I wouldn't let anything happen to you. So forgive me for not wanting you to walk in there and—”

“What, get my heart broken?” It’s a backhanded retort, even if she doesn’t mean it to be. “Please. I can handle a little disappointment. You put too much stock in what my mother says. What as it this time? The plot of _Independence Day_ ? _Armageddon_?”

Michael remembers the bone-chilling words. “Threats of armed men, unmarked graves… you buried in the desert—”

“And no one would ever hear my voice again? That’s _Brain Leechers IV_ ,” Maria says in a pinched off voice, biting her lip. “We still have the Blockbuster copy on a shelf that she forgot to return when I was eight. That’s why I’m here, Guerin. So I can have a conversation with my mother that doesn’t in a doomsday plot about UFO conspiracies or men in black kicking in our doors.”

The crowd is pushing past them. Rumbling, chattering, rife with anticipation. Across the lot, Maria can see Liz and Michael can see Max. They are standing apart, both waving them over. Max eagerly so, and Liz wearing a dejected look of lapsed disbelief. He could curse Liz out for bringing Maria here, for not talking her out of this. She’s more than smart enough to know better. 

Michael catches Maria by the elbow before she can trot so stubbornly off. Her eyes follow up the site of his touch, up his arm, his shoulder, his eyes. She looks listless, fiery and ardent like she knows what he is going to say and can counter it a hundred times over.

It doesn’t stop Michael from trying, from whispering low, “I know how much you want to help you mom, but this isn’t it.”

Maria shakes her head, eyes shining and wide. Michael knows a lost cause set in her too-human heart when he sees it. She looked at him like that before, once. When they were two of a pair that didn’t match, didn’t follow suit, drawn from their own deck of cards. Each of them choosing to believe they weren’t alone, that it couldn’t hurt to trust when they damn well knew better.

This must be what it looks like, Michael concurs; watching someone you love riding for a fall, knowing that when the bottom drops out from beneath her, he wouldn’t be able to catch her.

“Guess we’ll have to see, Guerin, won’t we?”

* * *

Maria goes quiet after. Stalking off to a bar, face unreadable, kicking up Texas dirt with her heels. Michael is hot on her trail leaving Liz and Max behind. They’re interrogating Arizona, the medicine woman who is, of course, a fraud. A grifter like any other trying to make her own ends meet. Michael could have respected that if she hadn't taken Maria's hard-earned money and left that frown on her face, that chink in her amour. 

Seated at _The Mineshaft Tavern_ , Maria still hasn’t said much aside from the whispering over the yodeling of the live band, “You can say it. You can say _‘I told you so.’_ ”

Michael locks up tight, throat choked on a wish that he could have given her a miracle. It mystifies him how Maria can see so clearly through some and not others. How hope and faith fit so perfectly into the blindspots in her gift and her mercenary mind. It leaves him hot and angry, bitterly glad he swiped open the swindler’s cash box when he did. It's a small consequence but the best he can do. After all, the last one who pulled one over on her, the last person to abuse her trust, was him.

By the time Liz and his brother catch up, he’s bought a round of tequila for the table. Max backs off, refusing to partake because Isobel is still gone and Max wants to suffer in shame and guilt until her absence is remedied. 

Maria slaps her hands on the table. It’s the final straw.

“Turns out my mom’s gonna lose all her memories by the time she’s fifty. Arizona’s a thief. I’ve been stuck with Guerin all day… and Max is moping? No,” she rises from her chair, walking off in a huff. “Absolutely not.” 

Michael is waiting for Liz to swoop in, step up, make her feel better because it's not like Maria will let _him_ do it, no matter how much he wants to. But Liz is resolute, unbothered, watches Maria climb the stage and command the five-piece band’s attention. Seconds later they’re strumming out Morissette and Maria has a microphone in hand.

Liz drags Michael to the dance floor but its Maria his feet shuffle towards. He’s heard her voice a thousand times, basked in her songstress chords ringing out over his truck’s beat-up radio box. But he’s never heard her silken voice as it radiates through a crowd. Never felt it filling up the rafters and bringing the house down. Never satisfied, she struts past him across the dance floor not missing a beat, eyes set on his brother she pulls him to his feet. Somehow the stars above align and Max dances, Max _sings_ , and Michael learns he really does believe in women who can spin miracles out of nothing.

* * *

“What are you doing out here?” she asks with a hint of playful accusation. She flushed and happy, cheeks glowing from the booze. She wraps a flannel blanket around her shoulders from the cool air. “There's an entire bar full of women who know nothing about you,” she teases.

There’s only one woman who does, goes unsaid.

“I am just trying to get some fresh air. Sober up”

“Fresh air is overrated,” she decides, lighting up a smoke. 

“So is sobering up,” Michael agrees, following her out into the night.

*

It reminds him of another time not so long ago. 

Just the two of them laying on the back of his truck bed, stargazing upwards with the tailgate down and passing a joint. Michael twisted their white smoke exhalations into the shapes all for her amusement. Crafted misty diamonds, clubs, spades, and hearts. An arrow through a smoking bull’s eye. A dissolving sun eclipsing their view of the full moon overhead. 

“You know what I like about you, Guerin?” she asked sounding breathless and far-off.

“‘Course I do,” he retorted. “It’s my good looks and my handsy nature.” He drummed his fingers down the side of her ribcage, eliciting a giggle and a swat to his arm. But then Maria leaned her head into the crook of his arm, watches the smoke from her cigarette tip blossom into musical notes that dangled above them.

“You know what to do with a good quiet,” murmurs pensively. She brings her hand to her breastbone, as if remembering something wistful and lost. “Roswell is a town that never shuts up… but you—”

Michael glanced aside, threaded his fingers through hers where they rested on her chest. Counted all the ways he hasn’t said all the things he needs to tell her.

“There's such a thing as too much quiet, DeLuca.”

*

She’s mocking his grasp over the cardinal directions, how he’ll never make it as a desert sherpa because they’ve been walking in circles for what feels like hours. He's sure her heels are killing her but Michael trudges on and on, leading them forward not back. Lost or not, part of him is reveling in it. He hasn't been alone with her for this long in ages. 

Come to think, it’s probably her fault they are lost. She screws with his internal compass. Her presence, her attention, even her malignments all share a kind of magnetism. A force that kept him coming back to her, the flickering arrow of his heart aimed at hers.

When she points out yet again he’ll never be a coyote or one with the desert, he’s halfway through kissing before she realizes what hit her. Pulling her close the way he’s been waiting to, needing to, like he’ll never get the chance to kiss her again. He leaves her stunned when he pulls back.

Maria DeLuca, clairvoyant extraordinaire, hadn’t seen it coming.

But neither does he when she drags him down for another kiss and another after that. They hit the ground, barely managing to kick off their boots and lay the blanket underneath.

* * *

“A roll in the desert doesn’t change—” Maria’s spine arches as Michael kisses between her breasts making his way down to her navel, “—doesn’t change anything.” Michael has half a mind to sink lower, mouthing his way back to the crest of her sex. But her fingers ghost through his curls, lingering before tightening and dragging him up.

Michael places a kiss on each of her knuckles before accepting the flask she offers him. Whiskey, of course. Burns all the way down, same as her. A rolled cigarette would make the afterglow is pretty much perfect. But he’s patted down her discarded clothes and his and there isn’t one to be found between them.

“Nothing has to change,” Michael says. “We just go back to being us. No more lies. No more secrets. No more pretending. That’s all we gotta do.”

Maria shakes her head. “It’s not that simple.” She moves to get up, to pull away, rising to find her clothes and keys.

Michael remembers the top of the mesa. How Maria teetered close to the edge and wondered if Michael could catch her if she fell, if it would feel like flying. She had placed so much trust in him, wagered on him against all she knew of gravity. Losing that trust makes him ache. He wouldn’t dare let her jump then, but now, wrapping his powers around her, pulling her back along the invisible thread that runs from him to her, he would give her anything she wants.

“Did you just—” Maria accuses when she lands in his lap, back pressed to his chest. He locks his arms around her waist.

“Ask me anything, Maria,” he whispers into the crook of her neck, “I’ll tell you the truth. But don’t ask me to let you go again because I can’t.”

Maria eases into his arms. “Why lie? Michael, why let me believe you were something you’re not?”

“You looked at my hand and you asked me what was true and what was a lie. And you saw the answer; that I was the same as you, that you weren’t alone when you were with me.”

“But I was wrong. We’re not the same.”

Michael chuckles. Holds her closer. She still didn’t get it.

“We’re the two kids who didn’t make it out of that piece of shit town. The two that survive every damn day, making the best of it.” Michael runs his hands over the half formed calluses along her hands. It was his turn to read her, telling her fortune in reverse about the past that led them here. “It’s a patchwork job with a lotta scrap and booze and card tricks. And maybe it ain't always pretty and it ain't always nice. But you and me? We make it work.” 

Maria presses her eyes closed, not letting herself be convinced no matter how much she wants to. She has had enough heartache for one day, enough disappointed hopes. Michael needs to prove to her he’s anything but

“Tell me what you see when you look at me,” Michael whispers.

“A white man in desperate need of a hair pick.”

“True,” Michael concedes and she smiles. “What else?”

“It’s a lot of things, its…” Maria sighs, circles the veins of Michael’s wrist with her thumb. “In this hand its whiskey sours, screwdrivers, bruises, and cigarette burns.”

“That's it?”

“I see a wrench and a lockpick. The front door The Wild Pony. I see getting by with a pocket full of cash that isn't yours. Outside of a window, you looking in. I see the interstate, but you’ll never take it. Family, but they’re gonna leave you behind.”

“See. Just like you.”

Maria shook her head. God, she was stubborn. Michael loves her all the more.

“That's just the one hand.” She took his broken hand one more time. Held his old wounds tenderly. The skin was softer now, eased by the salves she made him. When he opens his fist this time, he feels all of himself stretching open, bared to her like an offering, unshielded, ready to be known. “In the other I see… so many lights. Like bottomless stars. More stars than I ever thought there could be in the whole universe.”

Michael wants to kiss her again, taste that awe in her voice. But she still hasn’t asked him the one question that matters.

“Ask me what I am.”

Maria’s mouth opens before it closes again. Her lip trembles and not from the night air. She twists in his arms, angling up to kiss him again and they sink back onto the blanket.

Under the moonlight, she brings his hands together, the past and the future meeting them here, now, where they were always meant to be. 

“Tell me a lie,” she tells him.

“I just promised you no more lies, didn’t I?”

“Just do it,” Maria laughs.

“I really enjoyed the tourist bars. All the novelty drinks— can’t get enough of them. And I wasn’t the one who broke McMurray’s hand when I saw him lifting money out of your cash register. And I definitely didn’t wipe the floor with Jonsey Frederick after he opened his mouth about you—”

“Okay,” Maria shushes him with a finger to his lips. Her voice is a breathless giggle in the wind. Michael wants to chase the sound of it forever. But first—

“Now the truth,” Michael starts, “the truth is, I don’t know where I come from. I don’t why I’m here. And I don’t know where the hell I’m going. But I do know that I want you to trust me more than anything… because I need you. Because some days you’re the only thing on this planet that makes sense.”

“I know the feeling,” Maria offers back, pressing her forehead against his as she entrusts her truth to him at last. That he isn’t alone in this feeling. They’re in this together.

“Now I gotta ask you something this time.”

She bites her lip and nods. “Anything.”

Michael takes her hand this time. Kisses it again and again. He looks up to the stars and then back to her. “Maria, do you believe in aliens?”

She doesn’t answer at first. But she closes her eyes and lets out the breath she’s been holding these past days, weeks, all the time she’s known him. They’ve always been on the verge of this. The cusp of a promise where they have nothing to hide.

By sunrise, Michael has told her all he knows. By sunrise, Maria lets herself believe.

 

 

 

**_fin._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **  
> **  
> [Click to roll those 1999 credits!!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87nJoBSfQ_Q)  
>   
> 
> Seriously, if you've stuck with this story since it was first posted- waaay the hell back during Cinco De Mayo- then please let me thank you from the bottom of my heart. For all of it's flaws on my part and its very long hiatus, this story means so much to me. For me to be able to share my creativity, let alone finish a multi-chapter story, is something I never thought I'd actually pull off. This dynamic means the world to me and I hope I wrote a story worthy of Michael and Maria in all their fun and frisky glory! ♠♦
> 
> Thanks again for all of your patience. And thanks most of all to Nathalie. Without you, this story wouldn't exist, let alone ever have gotten finished.
> 
> See you round, readers!


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